America Loves Meat Again. I’m Sticking With the Fake Stuff.

I love a good burger. The best one I’ve eaten in recent memory was devoured on Memorial Day alongside hearty scoops of potato salad, just like thousands of other Americans across the country. The patty was thick, juicy and cooked to perfection. It was also 0% meat.

Oh, did I bury the lede? My burger affection is specifically heaped upon plant-based patties. And it’s not just fake beef, either. I drool over the fake kimchi brats and fake hickory bacon from the Herbivorous Butcher, my local “vegan butcher shop.” (If a “vegan butcher” triggers you, don’t read this.) I don’t regularly eat chicken nuggets, as I’m an adult, but I have previously enjoyed Impossible’s take on the after-school snack. And a Saturday morning sandwich with spicy Beyond Sausage patties is my personal breakfast of champions. I certainly don’t love all fake meat — I still have nightmares about a rubbery seitan cheesesteak I ordered at a hippie cafe in college — but I crave a lot of it. We are, after all, in the golden age of fake meat.

If recent trends are to be believed, most of you reading this can’t relate to what I’m saying. Americans are apparently shedding their plant-based pretensions and going whole-hog back into the carnivore lifestyle. Meat sales in the U.S. recently hit an all-time high: $104.6 billion in 2024, according to an industry report cited by The New York Times. Even more telling is that, according to that same report, the Times noted that “the number of consumers who said they were trying to eat less meat fell to 22%, the lowest level in at least five years.”

Not only is the U.S. eating more meat overall, but it seems that most Americans feel the benefits of meat consumption far outweigh any downsides. Or maybe they think animal flesh is simply too lip-smacking good to pass up.

Look, I get it. When my dad fired up the grill on summer nights in high school, my typical plate included one burger and two brats (I played multiple sports, so I ate an insane amount). My high school graduation party served ribs, for god’s sake.

But today, I’ll choose fake meat over real meat every single time because I’m now an adult who can understand the consequences of my actions, and I prefer to eat food that doesn’t cause unfathomable cruelty to animals and doesn’t contribute to the acceleration of human-caused climate change. Plus, when it’s prepared right, I get all the health benefits and taste-bud euphoria from fake meat that I once did from actual meat.

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The reports about America’s rekindled love affair with meat and move away from plant-based imitators cite various reasons. There’s the Make America Healthy Again argument that meat is essentially a superfood, and much better than ultra-processed foods, like modern fake meat. When Yasmin Tang wrote about how “plant-based eating has lost its appeal” for The Atlantic, she noted “concerns about…taste.” She also described a general vibe shift: Americans are going to choose what they eat for selfish reasons. “Knowing the reasons you should eat less meat goes only so far,” she argued. “I feel guilty eating steak tartare, but it’s still my favorite dish.”

The first two meat-friendly motives here are easy to counter. The idea that real meat is healthier than the boogeyman of ultra-processed fake meat only holds up in a theoretical vacuum where the meat-eater is solely surviving on organic, locally-raised beef, chicken and pork that they cook at home. But that’s not reality, is it?

Zooming in on one major criticism, yes, imitation meat tends to have more sodium than real meat. On its website, Impossible notes that a four-once serving of their plant-based beef has 370 mg of sodium versus 75 mg in USDA 80/20 ground beef. Go out and eat beef anywhere other than your own home, though, like Steak ‘n Shake, the fast-food chain promoted by U.S. Health Secretary and MAHA captain Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for using beef tallow, and you’re probably sucking down sodium. A double cheeseburger and regular fries there, which is what Kennedy reportedly ate, has 1570 mg of sodium. The ideal limit per day is 1500 mg, according to the American Heart Association. And heads up, not even store-bought meat is safe from the modern industrial food era: chicken and other meats sometimes undergo a process called “plumping,” where a saltwater solution is injected inside, increasing sodium levels. So much for “unprocessed.”

As for the taste, let’s not forget how plant-based meat surged into the public consciousness in the first place: by staging blind taste tests where people like Glenn Beck thought an Impossible Burger was real beef and a real hamburger was plant-based. The problem many people have when cooking with plant-based meat — as I’ve experienced first-hand at various family functions — is they don’t know how to cook it properly. Much of the time the cooking instructions are similar to real meat, but it’s not exactly one to one. Ground beef from a cow is going to taste horrible if you don’t know what you’re doing in the kitchen or at the grill; the same is true of imitation beef.

The third reason Americans are back on board the meat train is admittedly harder to reckon with. Maybe people just care less about climate change and animal welfare than they did a couple years ago. The problems with meat production, however, have only grown: Recent estimates show livestock contributes 12% to 19.6% of total greenhouse gas emissions, and that’s expected to increase as the global population grows and more people eat more meat. Meanwhile, the unconscionable treatment of animals in the factory farm system — which is often simply swept under the rug — continues as ever. As bird flu has spread in recent years, millions of chickens and turkeys on these farms have been allowed to be killed using a method called “ventilation shutdown plus,” which involves “sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours,” as Vox reported. The outlet called it “one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the U.S. food system.” Key phrase there: “one of.” You can easily find many more.

Do you want to be part of that system? Do you want to co-sign that with your hard-earned money? I don’t.

Admittedly, I also don’t have any easy answers for big issues like climate change and factory farming. And I’m not here to say that eating meat is wrong. But I do have an easy ask for any meat-eating Americans: just eat less of it. It’ll be better for your health, better for the planet (specifically humanity’s continued ability to thrive on it) and better for animal welfare. Plant-based meat is a great way to accomplish this. If you eat beef a few times a week, consider using Beyond Beef for one of those dinners. Maybe it’ll spur you to seek out other plant-based options. If you have a local shop like me with their own plant-based recipes, give those a try.

And if plant-based burgers just aren’t for you, maybe try a good old-fashioned bean burger. There’s a whole wide world of protein-packed foods out there that involve exactly 0% meat.