The goal of a “plant-based future”—a future in which humans, all of us, abandon animal foods for grains, legumes, nuts, fruits, vegetables and novel “alternative proteins” created by scientists—is central to the project of saving the planet from runaway climate change. We must abandon traditional agriculture, we’re told, to reduce our greeenhouse gas emissions and feed a global population of 10 billion people a healthy, fair diet. The number of people in Africa, in particular, is projected to increase four-fold this century, and there’s no question of five billion Africans eating the diet of the average American or European. In 2019, the EAT-Lancet Commission produced the “Planetary Health Diet,” the first global diet with those two aims in mind, and it now has the backing of governments, NGOs, the scientific community, celebrities and activists.
I made the Planetary Health Diet the subject of my 2022 book, “The Eggs Benedict Option.” I argued that a “plant-based future” would be a disaster, not only for our freedom, because we would surrender even more control of the food supply to corporations (only they can produce genetically modified crops and “lab-grown meat”), but also for our health. We need animal foods. There is no simple equivalence between the nutrition provided by a rib-eye steak and a soy burger containing the same weight of protein, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
As was established definitively by the dentist-cum-anthropologist Weston A. Price, the healthiest human societies, whether in the South Pacific, the Arctic or the Highlands of Scotland, have all built their diets around nutrient-dense animal foods: animal organs, dairy, shellfish and seafood, eggs, fat products like butter and lard. Animal foods provide vital nutrients we simply cannot find readily in plants, which is one of the reasons vegans—and vegan children, in particular—suffer so terribly, even when they try to supplement their diets with the nutrients they’re missing, such as creatine, vitamin B12 and certain essential amino acids.
One acute fear, for those who don’t want to abandon the foods they love, has been the prospect of government meat bans. In “The Eggs Benedict Option,” I explained why I think such bans will never happen.
Meat bans and bans on animal foods more broadly would just be too unpopular. People really like eating meat and animal foods. I cited a survey from Australia that showed close to 75 percent of men there would prefer to lose 10 years of their lives than give up meat.
Given a free choice, people just won’t do it. This is reflected in the dismal fortunes of brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger. Despite billions of dollars in investment and enormous hype, nobody wants to buy “plant-based burgers” made with proprietary GMO ingredients. In 2019, shares in Beyond Meat were trading at more than $200. Today, they’re about $0.66.
Modern democratic government is built on the notion of consent. However authoritarian governments become, so long as they claim to be democratic, they must maintain at least the illusion of consent.
We saw this on vivid display during the pandemic. Governments didn’t have to make vaccination mandatory by passing laws. All they had to do was increase social pressure by bombarding the public with propaganda and terrifying them about COVID-19, and dangle the prospect of reductions in individual freedom, to make the majority of people, young and old, take the vaccine, regardless of the actual risk they faced. You do want to travel don’t you? It would be a shame if you couldn’t go out clubbing with your friends, wouldn’t it? Vaccination became mandatory de facto, yet the illusion of choice was maintained. Clever.
“Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat,” author Annaliese Griffin wrote, as millions of Americans were struggling to put food on the table.
“While hunger and food insecurity are a very real problem in the United States and globally, middle- and upper-class Americans still have more choices at the grocery store than perhaps any food shoppers in history. Climate change has motivated some to eat less resource-intensive meat and more vegetables, grains and legumes, but this movement has not reached the scale necessary to bring needed change—yet.”
Griffin even went so far as to praise the 1917 Lever Act, which allowed the U.S. government to requisition food from citizens to prevent wartime hoarding. Could the government really confiscate meat from its citizens?
But such measures, as I say, are unlikely to be used. What I think we’ll see is a whole manner of underhanded tactics, some familiar, some less so. One tactic could involve allowing the infrastructure that supports the production of animal foods to collapse. That appears to be what the left-wing British government, which is committed to reducing meat consumption, is doing right now.
It’s not hard to imagine what the effects of continuing closures might be. They’ll obviously affect the price of meat—livestock will have to be transported further for slaughter—but it’s also likely to reduce the availability of meat, full stop. The National Farmers’ Union has warned that 43 percent of farmers would stop selling their meat locally if their abattoirs closed.
Conservative Members of Parliament, at least, are paying attention.
According to Farmers Guide, “The NFU… recently hosted a roundtable in Parliament on support for small and medium-sized abattoirs, bringing together cross-party MPs to discuss the challenges facing the industry and the alarming number of closures seen across the country.
“The total number of UK abattoirs fell below 200 in 2024, with closures often due to the rising cost of official controls, energy and waste disposal bills and increasing red tape ...
“During the talks, MPs were told about the contributions small and medium-sized abattoirs make to the rural economy and independent food supply, including their role in the supply chain of pubs, butchers and local markets, as well as the additional services they provide to farmers such as private kills …
“The complexity of the regulatory environment was cited as one of the major issues facing smaller abattoirs, with multiple regulators and agencies providing inspections, including the EA, Trading Standards, planning authorities, the RPA and EHOs. MPs heard that contradictory inspections between agencies had been reported by abattoirs.”
A recent High Court ruling also found the Food Standards Agency had been illegally overcharging abattoirs to provide official controls and testing.
This is a problem that’s been in the making for years, if not decades. But what’s also clear is that the British government has no real interest in solving it. Here’s an easy way the supply of meat can be strangled, without ever having to do something as unpopular as ban meat altogether or add carbon taxes to animal products to “offset” emissions.
What else? You could encourage rewilding—the conversion of farmland to managed “wild” land—and you could subsidize pasture to be turned into solar farms. You could put the squeeze on restaurants and the hospitality industry—which provide an essential stable demand for animal products—and you could drive rural pubs to close. You could discourage native food culture, promoting, say, vegetarian Indian food as healthier, tastier and “exclusionary” in an increasingly “diverse” Britain.
But these aren’t conditionals: these things are actually happening too.
This is why I’ve said, again and again, including in “The Eggs Benedict Option,” that there needs to be a determined political movement to ensure the right to nutrient-dense animal foods, the foods on which our ancestors thrived and which are essential to our proper health, as well as our identity. America is lucky enough to have “Make America Healthy Again,” which is already making strides in that direction. RFK Jr. has promoted whole milk—I’m told he even wanted to promote raw milk—and he’s inverted the demonic food pyramid, turning it up the right way for the first time in 50 years.
In states like Florida, lab-grown meat and other “alternative proteins” are being banned, and more red states are starting to follow suit. If you believe in the free market, this might offend you, but if one thing is clear when it comes to the “plant-based future,” it’s that the market has already spoken. Unfortunately, governments aren’t listening.
