Thread by @mjs_DC

I want to be clear that meat has been a “culture war” issue for a while. The meat industry relentlessly associates the consumption of animal flesh with masculinity and patriotism. But today more people are recognizing the catastrophic environmental consequences of meat ...

... and these folks tend to care about the climate crisis, which means they’re disproportionately progressive, which means people like Hotline Josh pick up on meat’s culture war valence because it falls along traditional partisan lines and becomes woke-adjacent Fox News fodder.

I have been a vegetarian for 18 years. I do not ever preach the virtues of vegetarianism and don’t even like talking about it. Yet people consistently take my refusal to eat meat as a personal and political affront, and often code it in terms of gender and sexuality.

One point of “plant-based meat” is to drain the culture war overtones from the whole meat debate, to reframe the conversation: You aren’t refraining from meat, you’re just eating a different kind of meat. That’s why the meat industry is trying to censor these products and ads.

Politicians who take money from the meat industry, disproportionately Republicans, are trying to ban plant-based meat companies from using that phrase; this is the real political battle around meat today, and it’s a bona fide attack on free speech. ij.org/ll/october-201…

So we have reached a curious place: Republicans want to turbocharge meat as a culture war issue at the same time that they seek to gag companies from exercising their First Amendment rights to say “plant-based meat.” Insert joke about cancel culture here.

The upshot is that meat as a culture war issue is NOT new, it has been aggressively fomented by the industry itself, it is being exacerbated by Republican efforts to interfere with the free market and free speech simultaneously, and vegetarians did not ask for any of this shit.

So when Hotline Josh cites a single restaurant’s decision to become vegetarian as proof that meat is a “new” culture war, he is misunderstanding decades of history that illustrate how the meat industry made itself a culture warrior to boost profits and protect market share.