Should the Great Food Transformation be Fake-Meat Free? Considering Strategies for a Future of Food that is Kinder to People, Animals, and the Planet

In 2019, former Trump White House adviser Sebastian Gorka infamously denounced advocates of the Green New Deal with the pithy admonishment, “They want to take away your hamburgers.” This rhetoric is ironic given that none of the politicians supporting the Deal have suggested widescale adoption of vegan diets, much less any laws or policies restricting the consumption of animal-based meat. However, given our species’ broken relationship to food, perhaps they should. The 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission Food in the Anthropocene report laid bare the scope of our current global predicament, warning that “[g]lobal food production threatens climate stability and ecosystem resilience and constitutes the single largest driver of environmental degradation and transgression of planetary boundaries. Taken together the outcome is dire.” The report argues that “global efforts are urgently needed to collectively transform diets and food production” and that, ultimately, “what is needed is rapid adoption of numerous changes and unprecedented global collaboration and commitment: nothing less than a Great Food Transformation.”