MAHA’s Meat Obsession Exposes the Movement’s Delusions

This is also the big blind spot for those who see meat as an alternative to so-called “ultra-processed food,” or UPF. Kennedy Jr. and many in MAHA-adjacent meatfluencer circles tout meat as an unprocessed alternative to the industrial slop they see as polluting American diets. The government’s new guidelines explicitly urge Americans away from processed food and toward meat. Lest this be dismissed as bro-science, this is also how Nova, the Brazilian food schema from which we get the idea of UPFs, classifies meat. Nova, which is shaping food policy from Brazil to Belgium to California, clusters foods into groups based on their level of processing, and deems any food that is produced using industrial processes or industrially produced additives as “ultra-processed.” The term creates an easy bogeyman and facile shorthands, such as RFK Jr.’s claim that products with ingredients “that I can’t pronounce” are dangerous (a lukewarm reheating of Pollan’s equally anti-intellectual suggestion, “If you can’t say it, don’t eat it”).

Putting aside the debate over the actual validity of the term and its applicability to adjudicating the healthfulness of food, Nova and other definitions of “ultra-processing” start at the farm gate, when harvested food begins its journey from field to fork. Thus, soy beans processed and mixed with other ingredients like methylcellulose to make an Impossible Burger, or even some types of tofu, are branded as ultra-processed, as if they were nutritionally equivalent to Doritos. Meat, meanwhile, escapes scrutiny because schemas like Nova have nothing to say about the process of commodity production itself. A pig or chicken genetically modified to grow extremely fast and fed a steady diet of soybean meal and industrially produced feed additives like phytase will, when slaughtered, become meat that is considered “unprocessed.” So the production process at factory farms, where most U.S. meat comes from, is made to disappear with a definitional sleight of hand—and meat, arguably the most industrial of America’s major foods, emerges as somehow anti-industrial. This, in turn, conceals not just meat’s provenance but the fact that it is both far more environmentally harmful and likely less healthy than an “ultra-processed” plant-based alternative.

It’s all the more troubling, then, to see meat being touted as a health food. HHS’s guidelines have almost doubled the recommended daily intake of protein over its predecessors, and nutritional advice online is increasingly pivoting to describing meat as a nutritionally dense superfood. And yet, protein deficiency is not a generalized health risk in the U.S. The USDA’s Healthy Eating Index shows that Americans are not eating enough fruit, vegetables, and whole grains. Meanwhile, the average American male already eats as much protein as the new guidelines suggest (or about twice as much as the old guidelines did).