Source: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/vegetarians-eat-meat-again?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Archive: https://archive.is/pgoCh
By Ali Francis
May 24, 2023
Welcome to Anxious Carnivores, a mini-series about the changing culture around meat consumption. Despite growing pressures to quit meat, many Americans can’t quite do so—but they’re getting weirder and weirder about how they eat it.
In 2014 Veronica Sent started dreaming about meat—every night. She’d turn the lights off, drift away, and then boom: “I was eating massive tins of tuna and hot dogs,” she says. And not just any hot dogs. These were würstels, blush pink German-style sausages typically made from pork and beef and cased in sheep’s intestine.
This was unusual. The 36-year-old dog groomer, who grew up in Venice, Italy, but now lives in San Francisco, had been a strict vegetarian for about 15 years before the hot dogs started haunting her dreams. She’d stopped eating meat for animal welfare reasons, but it seemed as if her subconscious self was “screaming” at her. So Sent reluctantly decided to reintroduce some meat and fish into her diet.
Sent’s decision to eat meat after going so long without it might seem like an unrealistically hard pivot. But many like her—long-term vegetarians in the US—do eventually eat meat again. At just 5% by some estimates, plant-based eaters are already the vast minority in this country. In 2014 Faunalytics (formerly Humane Research Council), an organization that conducts research to support animal welfare, discovered that 84% of the 11,000 vegans and vegetarians in their study pretty quickly reverted back to their omnivorous ways. One third of participants lasted less than three months, and over half had started eating meat again within the first year.
Unlike those in the 2014 study, all of the 25 former vegetarians I interviewed had followed the diet for at least five years; these were no casual flings. Most stopped eating meat with intentions similar to Sent’s: They wanted to protest the ways animals were being raised and killed in the US and ease their impacts on the environment. Still, despite their motivations, they eventually ditched vegetarianism for various reasons they couldn’t anticipate—reasons that had as much to do with their communities and culture as they did with typically cited nutritional needs.
It’s not as though the ethical concerns that first drive people to vegetarianism magically disappear when they decide, for whatever reason, to eat meat again. This kind of dissonance between our values and our actions can be super uncomfortable, and most of the people I spoke to often feel guilty about eating animals and polluting the environment, or struggle with the ick factor when they have to handle or cook meat. “When I stopped being vegetarian, I was very upset with myself and felt that I was betraying my values and the animals,” says Sent. “I spent at least a year eating meat, fish, and eggs in secret.”
My own relationship with meat is on and off, as if it’s a toxic ex I struggle to block. I don’t really eat animals. But I was a strict vegetarian for multiple years in my youth before eventually easing animal proteins back into my diet—and then quitting them again years later. Now I partake in what one vegetarian friend calls the “awkward occasion fish”—a.k.a., I’m vegetarian but will eat seafood to make life easier for stressed hosts. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still crave a burger here and there. So, what is it about meat that keeps us coming back?
-
I’ll get the most obvious answer out of the way first: Meat tastes really, really good. British journalist and formerly lifetime vegetarian, Huw Oliver, tried steak for the first time during the pandemic. “The pinkish muscle tastes deep, rich, and butter-smooth in the mouth,” he wrote for Time Out. “And cor, that smell. It’s juicy, hearty, butterflies-inducing communal food to take your time over, and I love it.” Author Rajesh Parameswaran, also vegetarian for his whole life up until then, had a similar experience trying molleja for the first time in Argentina. “It was incredibly delicate, airy and light; at the same time it was somehow rich and sort of creamy,” he wrote for Bon Appétit.
Many interviewees felt the same intense, almost primal relationship with meat. It’s likely been a thing since our primate ancestors started accidentally eating worms who had burrowed into fruits about 65 million years ago, Marta Zaraska wrote in Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat. No matter how plentiful other foods may be, we’ve long shared a “craving for animal flesh.” Scientists have a name for the phenomenon: “meat hunger,” an evolutionary drive to secure protein-rich foods.
That explains why, like Sent, we might literally dream about animal flesh over pumpkin seeds, purple cabbage, or plump bananas. And why, even having never tasted meat before, Oliver and Parameswaran felt its allure. Meat is full of protein, which our bodies are designed to “prioritize and actively seek out,” Zaraska wrote. (Does that mean we need to be piling our plates with steak, like the Atkins, keto, and paleo dieters? Not at all. Protein deficiency is virtually unheard of in the US, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.)
While many former vegetarians do start eating meat again for health reasons, their desire for animal flesh often isn’t about individual nutrients at all. In the majority of my interviews, people mentioned social and emotional drivers, like missing the foods they grew up with, feeling estranged from their cultures, and not wanting to cook two different meals for themselves and their partners or children. And others became social omnivores who simply wanted to partake in shared meat dishes while dining out with friends.
For Genevieve Yam, a 30-year-old food editor and Bon Appétit contributor living in Yonkers, New York, animal products reminded her of family when she needed it most. She’d been vegetarian for a decade before eating meat again during 2020. Her mom, who lives in Hong Kong, had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and Yam was grief-stricken. “For a long time, she was what kept me rooted to my family and culture,” she tells me. “I was also just trying to hold on to as much of her as possible.” So Yam started learning how to make all her mom’s comforting Chinese meals, such as pork spareribs with taro and coconut milk, braised chicken and chestnuts, and bitter melon with beef.
Meanwhile, Daniela Molina, a 28-year-old creative director from Miami who went vegetarian in 2012, didn’t really realize she’d been missing the foods of her heritage until she tried them again in 2021. “I went to Ecuador to visit family, and it was the first time in years that I’d been there and not been vegan,” she tells me. “It’s customary to have a big pig roast. So, of course, I had some and it was so liberating and beautiful to be able to participate in cultural experiences like that once again.”
For others, eating meat was also an essential part of developing a healthy relationship with food. Bridget Moynihan has long grappled with all-or-nothing attitudes towards animal products. A big part of that is because she experiences “somewhat significant weight loss” when she’s strictly vegetarian. “I’ve struggled with body image issues all my life,” says the 24-year-old engineering student. “Vegetarianism has certainly played a role in some unhealthy eating habits; it’s hard to see easy weight loss and not abuse that pattern.”
Eating childhood foods such as bánh xèo, sizzling rice crepes typically stuffed with shrimp and pork, has been an important part of healing. “A lot of Vietnamese dishes are my go-to comfort foods, and it makes me feel good to eat them,” she says. “Restricting myself from all meat all the time was unsustainable.”
There is little quantitative evidence linking eating disorders and plant-based diets, and for most vegetarians, they’re not related. But clinicians are anecdotally reporting that more of their patients with anorexia nervosa are wanting to eschew animal products. Desiree Nielsen, RD, a plant-based dietician and multiple cookbook author based in Vancouver, Canada, doesn’t believe veganism or vegetarianism is inherently restrictive—after all, so many foods are still on the table. But she’s also seen patients use such preferences as masks for disordered eating. “It allows them to pull back from situations where they can’t control their intake,” she says.
When I was first vegetarian about 12 years ago, I was hiding an eating disorder. The diet, which had appealed to me for ethical reasons, also gave me a socially acceptable way to not eat in public. Until relatively recently, it was just too triggering to think about ditching animal products again. But lately, after giving myself permission to eat absolutely anything I wanted, I’ve noticed myself naturally veering away from meat. These days, I actually feel more joy when eating springy bowls of vegan ramen and vibrant salads.
-
Navigating the omnivore’s dilemma—ending animal lives to sustain our own—seems to make former vegetarians more conscious consumers than they perhaps would have been if they’d never tried to avoid meat in the first place. Gnawing meat off bones and cracking the shell of a lobster are visceral reminders that animals died for the food on their plates. It’s an inconvenient fact that motivated just about everyone I spoke to in finding ways to satisfy their beliefs as much as their cravings.
After ditching meat for environmental reasons, Caitlyn Davis, a 26-year-old event planner in Philadelphia, started following a new framework when she noticed how much meat was being thrown out after work functions. She began taking home—and eating––leftover London broil steaks, panko-crusted chicken breasts, and sesame tuna. Today, “I’ll buy meat from small and local farms over imitation meat products, but I’ll buy imitation meat over meat grown on factory farms,” she says.
Yam, the food editor in New York City, never buys what she calls “single serving meat.” She’ll opt for a whole chicken over breasts; the bones become stock and the fat becomes schmaltz. And Sent prefers smaller portions of cold cuts over huge steaks, buys mainly grass-fed meats, and eats almost vegetarian during the week. “My husband and I eat [animal products] during weekends as a way to treat ourselves,” she says.
-
Americans eat more meat than people do in almost any other country on earth. While many clearly oppose its macabre realities and environmental impacts, tearing into animal flesh is as much a bonding ritual now as it ever was. And so many people I spoke to said they felt as if they were being welcomed back to a special club when they told friends and family they were finally eating meat again. “My family were quite happy and relieved of this diet switch,” says Sent. “I was the black sheep and the only vegetarian.” Culturally, meat still has such a strong hold over us.
“Life is made so much harder for people who give up meat,” says Alicia Kennedy, a food and drink writer living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Bon Appétit contributor, and author of the forthcoming book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating. Many US restaurants, Kennedy says, have few vegetarian options on the menu—a reality I witnessed myself moving across the country recently—and the dominant way of cooking here still revolves around meat at the center of the plate. “It just becomes so much easier to default back to the culturally accepted style of eating,” she says.
Meat is an ethical conundrum for so many. It can also be hard to avoid eating it. So, where do we go from here? Probably as far away from “the hardcore dietary labeling” as we can get, says Kennedy. When you call yourself vegan or vegetarian, “and then you start to eat some meat or seafood again because you like it or you want it or for nutritional reasons, it’s treated like this big ideological shift when it’s really not,” she says. For the people I spoke to, they eventually realized they could both eat some meat and strongly oppose the way it’s produced.
In fact, for many people, that mindset works better than ironclad commitments. There’s a failure complex associated with strict diets, says Zaraska. Breaking them, even for one meal, “can sometimes lead people to throw in the towel completely, and that’s not the best solution, either.”
Seven years after their initial study revealed that the majority of people who cut out meat end up eating it again, the same Faunalytics researchers conducted another one. This time they flipped the coin, wanting to understand which factors help people stick to vegan and vegetarian diets long term. They surveyed 222 people for six months as they tried to ditch animal products, and found that patience (easing into it rather than going cold turkey) and flexibility (continuing to eat a small amount of animal products when it makes sense) were key to making less-meat diets work.
It’s an approach that Nielsen, a vegan herself, often takes with clients who want to at least cut back on animal products. Despite the extreme attitudes so many Americans seem to have about food, “our health is not made or broken by eating a single meal,” she says. “Even for those of us who come at veganism or vegetarianism from an ethical perspective, one moment doesn’t ruin your mission. It’s just a plate of food.”
Archive: https://archive.is/pgoCh
After Years of Being Vegetarian, They Couldn’t Help But Eat Meat Again
Many Americans who stay vegetarian for years—even decades—eventually eat animals again. And usually for reasons they can't anticipate.By Ali Francis
May 24, 2023
Welcome to Anxious Carnivores, a mini-series about the changing culture around meat consumption. Despite growing pressures to quit meat, many Americans can’t quite do so—but they’re getting weirder and weirder about how they eat it.
In 2014 Veronica Sent started dreaming about meat—every night. She’d turn the lights off, drift away, and then boom: “I was eating massive tins of tuna and hot dogs,” she says. And not just any hot dogs. These were würstels, blush pink German-style sausages typically made from pork and beef and cased in sheep’s intestine.
This was unusual. The 36-year-old dog groomer, who grew up in Venice, Italy, but now lives in San Francisco, had been a strict vegetarian for about 15 years before the hot dogs started haunting her dreams. She’d stopped eating meat for animal welfare reasons, but it seemed as if her subconscious self was “screaming” at her. So Sent reluctantly decided to reintroduce some meat and fish into her diet.
Sent’s decision to eat meat after going so long without it might seem like an unrealistically hard pivot. But many like her—long-term vegetarians in the US—do eventually eat meat again. At just 5% by some estimates, plant-based eaters are already the vast minority in this country. In 2014 Faunalytics (formerly Humane Research Council), an organization that conducts research to support animal welfare, discovered that 84% of the 11,000 vegans and vegetarians in their study pretty quickly reverted back to their omnivorous ways. One third of participants lasted less than three months, and over half had started eating meat again within the first year.
Unlike those in the 2014 study, all of the 25 former vegetarians I interviewed had followed the diet for at least five years; these were no casual flings. Most stopped eating meat with intentions similar to Sent’s: They wanted to protest the ways animals were being raised and killed in the US and ease their impacts on the environment. Still, despite their motivations, they eventually ditched vegetarianism for various reasons they couldn’t anticipate—reasons that had as much to do with their communities and culture as they did with typically cited nutritional needs.
It’s not as though the ethical concerns that first drive people to vegetarianism magically disappear when they decide, for whatever reason, to eat meat again. This kind of dissonance between our values and our actions can be super uncomfortable, and most of the people I spoke to often feel guilty about eating animals and polluting the environment, or struggle with the ick factor when they have to handle or cook meat. “When I stopped being vegetarian, I was very upset with myself and felt that I was betraying my values and the animals,” says Sent. “I spent at least a year eating meat, fish, and eggs in secret.”
My own relationship with meat is on and off, as if it’s a toxic ex I struggle to block. I don’t really eat animals. But I was a strict vegetarian for multiple years in my youth before eventually easing animal proteins back into my diet—and then quitting them again years later. Now I partake in what one vegetarian friend calls the “awkward occasion fish”—a.k.a., I’m vegetarian but will eat seafood to make life easier for stressed hosts. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still crave a burger here and there. So, what is it about meat that keeps us coming back?
-
I’ll get the most obvious answer out of the way first: Meat tastes really, really good. British journalist and formerly lifetime vegetarian, Huw Oliver, tried steak for the first time during the pandemic. “The pinkish muscle tastes deep, rich, and butter-smooth in the mouth,” he wrote for Time Out. “And cor, that smell. It’s juicy, hearty, butterflies-inducing communal food to take your time over, and I love it.” Author Rajesh Parameswaran, also vegetarian for his whole life up until then, had a similar experience trying molleja for the first time in Argentina. “It was incredibly delicate, airy and light; at the same time it was somehow rich and sort of creamy,” he wrote for Bon Appétit.
Many interviewees felt the same intense, almost primal relationship with meat. It’s likely been a thing since our primate ancestors started accidentally eating worms who had burrowed into fruits about 65 million years ago, Marta Zaraska wrote in Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat. No matter how plentiful other foods may be, we’ve long shared a “craving for animal flesh.” Scientists have a name for the phenomenon: “meat hunger,” an evolutionary drive to secure protein-rich foods.
That explains why, like Sent, we might literally dream about animal flesh over pumpkin seeds, purple cabbage, or plump bananas. And why, even having never tasted meat before, Oliver and Parameswaran felt its allure. Meat is full of protein, which our bodies are designed to “prioritize and actively seek out,” Zaraska wrote. (Does that mean we need to be piling our plates with steak, like the Atkins, keto, and paleo dieters? Not at all. Protein deficiency is virtually unheard of in the US, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.)
While many former vegetarians do start eating meat again for health reasons, their desire for animal flesh often isn’t about individual nutrients at all. In the majority of my interviews, people mentioned social and emotional drivers, like missing the foods they grew up with, feeling estranged from their cultures, and not wanting to cook two different meals for themselves and their partners or children. And others became social omnivores who simply wanted to partake in shared meat dishes while dining out with friends.
For Genevieve Yam, a 30-year-old food editor and Bon Appétit contributor living in Yonkers, New York, animal products reminded her of family when she needed it most. She’d been vegetarian for a decade before eating meat again during 2020. Her mom, who lives in Hong Kong, had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and Yam was grief-stricken. “For a long time, she was what kept me rooted to my family and culture,” she tells me. “I was also just trying to hold on to as much of her as possible.” So Yam started learning how to make all her mom’s comforting Chinese meals, such as pork spareribs with taro and coconut milk, braised chicken and chestnuts, and bitter melon with beef.
Meanwhile, Daniela Molina, a 28-year-old creative director from Miami who went vegetarian in 2012, didn’t really realize she’d been missing the foods of her heritage until she tried them again in 2021. “I went to Ecuador to visit family, and it was the first time in years that I’d been there and not been vegan,” she tells me. “It’s customary to have a big pig roast. So, of course, I had some and it was so liberating and beautiful to be able to participate in cultural experiences like that once again.”
For others, eating meat was also an essential part of developing a healthy relationship with food. Bridget Moynihan has long grappled with all-or-nothing attitudes towards animal products. A big part of that is because she experiences “somewhat significant weight loss” when she’s strictly vegetarian. “I’ve struggled with body image issues all my life,” says the 24-year-old engineering student. “Vegetarianism has certainly played a role in some unhealthy eating habits; it’s hard to see easy weight loss and not abuse that pattern.”
Eating childhood foods such as bánh xèo, sizzling rice crepes typically stuffed with shrimp and pork, has been an important part of healing. “A lot of Vietnamese dishes are my go-to comfort foods, and it makes me feel good to eat them,” she says. “Restricting myself from all meat all the time was unsustainable.”
There is little quantitative evidence linking eating disorders and plant-based diets, and for most vegetarians, they’re not related. But clinicians are anecdotally reporting that more of their patients with anorexia nervosa are wanting to eschew animal products. Desiree Nielsen, RD, a plant-based dietician and multiple cookbook author based in Vancouver, Canada, doesn’t believe veganism or vegetarianism is inherently restrictive—after all, so many foods are still on the table. But she’s also seen patients use such preferences as masks for disordered eating. “It allows them to pull back from situations where they can’t control their intake,” she says.
When I was first vegetarian about 12 years ago, I was hiding an eating disorder. The diet, which had appealed to me for ethical reasons, also gave me a socially acceptable way to not eat in public. Until relatively recently, it was just too triggering to think about ditching animal products again. But lately, after giving myself permission to eat absolutely anything I wanted, I’ve noticed myself naturally veering away from meat. These days, I actually feel more joy when eating springy bowls of vegan ramen and vibrant salads.
-
Navigating the omnivore’s dilemma—ending animal lives to sustain our own—seems to make former vegetarians more conscious consumers than they perhaps would have been if they’d never tried to avoid meat in the first place. Gnawing meat off bones and cracking the shell of a lobster are visceral reminders that animals died for the food on their plates. It’s an inconvenient fact that motivated just about everyone I spoke to in finding ways to satisfy their beliefs as much as their cravings.
After ditching meat for environmental reasons, Caitlyn Davis, a 26-year-old event planner in Philadelphia, started following a new framework when she noticed how much meat was being thrown out after work functions. She began taking home—and eating––leftover London broil steaks, panko-crusted chicken breasts, and sesame tuna. Today, “I’ll buy meat from small and local farms over imitation meat products, but I’ll buy imitation meat over meat grown on factory farms,” she says.
Yam, the food editor in New York City, never buys what she calls “single serving meat.” She’ll opt for a whole chicken over breasts; the bones become stock and the fat becomes schmaltz. And Sent prefers smaller portions of cold cuts over huge steaks, buys mainly grass-fed meats, and eats almost vegetarian during the week. “My husband and I eat [animal products] during weekends as a way to treat ourselves,” she says.
-
Americans eat more meat than people do in almost any other country on earth. While many clearly oppose its macabre realities and environmental impacts, tearing into animal flesh is as much a bonding ritual now as it ever was. And so many people I spoke to said they felt as if they were being welcomed back to a special club when they told friends and family they were finally eating meat again. “My family were quite happy and relieved of this diet switch,” says Sent. “I was the black sheep and the only vegetarian.” Culturally, meat still has such a strong hold over us.
“Life is made so much harder for people who give up meat,” says Alicia Kennedy, a food and drink writer living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Bon Appétit contributor, and author of the forthcoming book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating. Many US restaurants, Kennedy says, have few vegetarian options on the menu—a reality I witnessed myself moving across the country recently—and the dominant way of cooking here still revolves around meat at the center of the plate. “It just becomes so much easier to default back to the culturally accepted style of eating,” she says.
Meat is an ethical conundrum for so many. It can also be hard to avoid eating it. So, where do we go from here? Probably as far away from “the hardcore dietary labeling” as we can get, says Kennedy. When you call yourself vegan or vegetarian, “and then you start to eat some meat or seafood again because you like it or you want it or for nutritional reasons, it’s treated like this big ideological shift when it’s really not,” she says. For the people I spoke to, they eventually realized they could both eat some meat and strongly oppose the way it’s produced.
In fact, for many people, that mindset works better than ironclad commitments. There’s a failure complex associated with strict diets, says Zaraska. Breaking them, even for one meal, “can sometimes lead people to throw in the towel completely, and that’s not the best solution, either.”
Seven years after their initial study revealed that the majority of people who cut out meat end up eating it again, the same Faunalytics researchers conducted another one. This time they flipped the coin, wanting to understand which factors help people stick to vegan and vegetarian diets long term. They surveyed 222 people for six months as they tried to ditch animal products, and found that patience (easing into it rather than going cold turkey) and flexibility (continuing to eat a small amount of animal products when it makes sense) were key to making less-meat diets work.
It’s an approach that Nielsen, a vegan herself, often takes with clients who want to at least cut back on animal products. Despite the extreme attitudes so many Americans seem to have about food, “our health is not made or broken by eating a single meal,” she says. “Even for those of us who come at veganism or vegetarianism from an ethical perspective, one moment doesn’t ruin your mission. It’s just a plate of food.”
More from Anxious Carnivores, our series on the changing culture of meat consumption:
- Get Bon Appétit in your inbox with our daily newsletter.
- Some ranchers and butchers are trying to eat—and kill—cows in the most ethical way they believe possible. This is what it looks like.
- From Yellowjackets to The Last of Us, here's why you can't stop watching people eat people on TV.
- All-meat diets are real and yeah, they're extreme.
- For all of their flaws, hot dogs may reveal more about the meat industry than any other product.
- The new Epicurious App is here with over 50,000 recipes.
