Meat won’t die

A depressing article appeared in the Guardian last month. Written by Oliver Milman, it begins by pointing out that “plant-based burgers were supposed to help wean Americans off their environmentally ruinous appetite for meat. But sales have plummeted amid a surging pro-meat trend embraced by the Trump administration, raising a key question – will vegetarianism ever take hold in the US?”

You can read the article in full at The Guardian online. I will simply extract a few facts here.

First:

This year has been a punishing one for the plant-based meat sector, led by companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, with sales of refrigerated products slumping 17%. This follows a difficult 2024, during which sales fell 7%, furthering a multi-year spiral – last year Americans purchased 75m fewer units of plant-based meat than they did in 2022.

Second:

Beyond Meat, the plant-based business that was valued at $10bn a few years ago has suffered a 97% drop in its share price since.

Third, Christopher Gardner, a nutrition expert at Stanford University, says:

“Not everyone has to become vegetarian but we will have to eat a lot less meat – at some point people will wake up and say ‘where have the rainforests gone?’” he said.

“We are heading to the point we don’t have the land or water to support the amount of meat we want to eat. I hope people finally get it. They have to get it. We are facing an existential moment here.”

Cynics might deny that people will ever “get it”. At some future point they will be told that Communist-loving eco-terrorist have somehow wasted all the water on their diversity and equality projects and they will choose to believe it.