MAHA’s ‘Natural’ Foods Obsession Doesn’t Account for the Way We Actually Eat

Trends focused on living and eating more “naturally” are becoming increasingly popular — off-the-grid, online and in politics. This shift, embraced in some right-leaning circles, rejects industrial agriculture’s influence on food systems in favor of so-called “crunchy” ideals. From homesteading to organic farming, raw milk to backyard eggs, the trend toward traditional living may seek simplicity and nostalgia. But it often overlooks the complexities of scaling food systems, and promotes misleading ideas about what’s “natural.”

One of the biggest misconceptions people have about naturalness, says professor Alan Levinovitz, author of the book “Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science,” is that it’s “synonymous with goodness.” Levinovitz tells Sentient that this misconception is being exploited by some political movements, in a time when people are feeling disempowered and unsure about the increasingly complex world around them.

‘Natural’ in the Age of MAHA and MAGA

With the recent rise of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, and the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the shift toward “natural” living and eating has been further fortified in the form of political promises to, in effect, make food natural again. On the agenda, according to Kennedy, is to “reverse 80 years of farm policy,” and instead focus on small-scale, organic and regenerative farming. But this is extremely unrealistic at-scale, thanks to the amount of animal products Americans are currently eating; more on that in a minute.

Another component for Kennedy of what constitutes “natural” is taking on things like red food dye, seed oils and ultra-processed foods — while promoting tallow, raw milk and grass-fed beef.

The appeal of returning to more old-fashioned foods fits perfectly in line with the regressive desire to “Make America Great Again.” While eating too much of many ultra-processed foods is indeed a problem for public health, the idea that America will be better off with fewer plant-based patties and more red meat is a hypermasculine and environmentally unfriendly fantasy. After all, a third of all greenhouse gas emissions come from food, and most of those food-related emissions come from beef.

But to many, the fantasy that we could all have backyard farms — or at least, that all our food could come from small farms — is a comforting one. “We live in what some philosophers and historians of technology refer to as an increasingly ‘epistemically opaque environment,’ and what they mean by that is we don’t understand, or we feel like we don’t understand, much of the stuff around us,” Levinovitz says. This includes our food system. “We used to feel like we understood where our food was coming from, or how it was manufactured,” he says, “and so as things become more complicated and people feel more disempowered, I think a turn towards ‘naturalness’ represents an escape from that epistemic opacity.” It feels simpler, he says, to promote the concept of naturalness, as vague as it can be. “It feels more intuitive, and it feels like you are in control.”

The Rise of the ‘Carnivore Diet’

Another part of this cultural shift towards more seemingly “natural” foods, beyond the perceived rejection of large-scale agriculture, is an incongruent rise in more meat-centric diets. This comes after plant-based eating experienced a notable boom during the early 2020s, amid mounting evidence of the impacts of animal farming on the climate. It’s resulted in a sort of counter movement, evidenced in trends like the carnivore and other meat-heavy diets.

The carnivore diet emphasizes eating only animal-based foods, while some ‘meatfluencers’ say it means eating like our ancestors. . This stems from false assumptions that our ancestors primarily consumed animal products, and that human physiology is optimized for a meat-based diet, when our ancestors really followed an omnivore diet. The carnivore diet has also become increasingly politicized as a fad of the right, encompassing aspects of hypermasculinity and white nationalism.

The Plant Meat Backlash

Before there was MAHA and the carnivore diet, there was veganism and the plant-based diet. During the late 2010s into the early 2020s, the U.S. saw an influx of interest in plant-based eating, and in the production of plant-based meat alternatives.

But novel meat alternatives have increasingly been deemed “ultra-processed,” “fake” and “synthetic,” juxtaposed against factory-farmed meat that’s touted as “natural” and “single ingredient.”

One source of this backlash to plant-based meat can be traced back to meat industry manipulation. A Super Bowl commercial and a New York Times ad, paid for by a public relations firm used by the meat industry, planted seeds of doubt in 2020, about “scary” ingredients in plant-based meat.

Sales of Beyond and Impossible meat plateaued (for a number of reasons that food industry media went on to hash out), and debates over “unnatural” and “ultra-processed” plant-based products raged. At the same time, the assumed naturalness of animal products persisted, as it does into today, largely unchallenged.

 “Despite the unnaturalness of factory farms,” says Levinovitz, “a steak looks like it came from an animal, which means that people feel like they understand where it came from.” Alternatively, he says things like textured proteins and other processed alternatives “simply aren’t so transparent, in the sense of where it came from, and what it is.” Nonetheless, he adds, “the problem is that people think that just because something is a ‘natural’ part of our diet,” such as meat, “it ought to be a part of our diet, or is therefore a healthy or optimal part of our diet. That’s the confusion of ‘natural’ with ‘good.’”

Why There’s Nothing Natural About Modern Meat

Over the last 50 years, the number of livestock farms across the western world has been in steady decline, while the number of animals has drastically increased. This means animals farmed for food today are kept mainly in large, confined animal feeding operations (CAFOS), or industrialized or intensive farms — a far cry from their natural habitats. Though marketing and labeling images portray animal agriculture as natural and pastoral —with red barns, rolling pastures and happy animals — these images do not represent the reality that over 70 percent of the world’s meat comes from factory farms (99 percent in the U.S.).

In these confined spaces, animals can be manipulated with light or food deprivation, and are often impeded from exhibiting many natural behaviors, including the simple act of turning around. Today’s farm animals are also purposely bred and genetically manipulated to possess more profitable traits, such as accelerated growth and larger size. These animals bear very little resemblance to their wild ancestors, and can suffer from various ailments due to their unnatural physiology. Despite increasing promotion of grass-fed beef and regenerative grazing, including by Kennedy, the vast majority of animals farmed for food in the U.S. are not out on pastures, but are instead fed soy and corn. About a third of all corn grown in the U.S. (the nation’s top crop), is used for animal feed, while about 60 percent of all soybean meal produced in the U.S. goes to feeding animals. On a global scale, nearly 80 percent of the world’s soybeans go to animals farmed for food.

Grass-fed beef only makes up about four percent of the value of the entire U.S. beef industry. Even then, “grass-fed” can include cattle who were fed grass (including farmed and harvested grasses) for only a portion of their lives.

Industrial animal farming also relies heavily on antibiotics (contributing to rising antimicrobial resistance in humans) and hormones in order to keep up with consumer demands for meat, dairy and eggs. According to Johns Hopkins Center for Liveable Future, “Americans are now among the top per capita meat consumers in the world,” with the average American eating “more than three times the global average.”

Meanwhile, production line-style slaughterhouses utilize gas chambers and electricity to kill more animals per day than ever before.

Once you look at the industrialized reality of where 99 percent of meat in America comes from, it’s easy to see there’s nothing natural about modern meat.

RFK’s Unrealistic Promise to Make the Meat Industry ‘Natural’ Again

While Kennedy has raised a few important issues regarding industrial animal farming, including critiquing large scale feedlots and corporate interests, his plans to make the meat industry “natural again” are dubious. Though he may be right about some of the problems, advocates and journalists have expressed concern that he is usually wrong about the solutions.

While shifting toward small-scale, organic and regenerative farming may sound like an improvement in some ways, scalability is a major issue in practice. But this reality is largely ignored in the MAHA space.

Industrialized animal farming exists in order to feed current demands for meat, dairy and eggs. Even just a switch to all grass-fed is likely unscalable at current rates of consumption. “In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%,” environmental researchers Matthew Hayek and Rachael D Garrett wrote in 2018. “We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply.”

The world’s population is also growing — expected to hit nearly 10 billion people by 2050. Over the past century or so, commercial agriculture has simply expanded operations in order to produce more food to keep up with population growth. But our natural resources, including land, are not unlimited, and the way we produce meat and dairy even now already comes at a steep environmental cost.

In order to shift the U.S. to more natural, small-scale animal farming systems for the population at large, a substantial reduction in meat, dairy and egg consumption would be required. And even then, a collective move to the carnivore diet is certainly not environmentally sustainable, given the amount of methane cows produce.

But we have yet to hear Kennedy say that. What we have heard is that organic food is the answer. But unfortunately, organic farming is not better for climate pollution, and has few if any proven health benefits. It would be extremely difficult and resource-intensive to scale.

The Bottom Line

Levinovitz believes the MAHA movement is “exploiting…a real and important need for people to feel empowered, and [to] feel like authority figures are giving them a say in their food system and in their medical system.” As modern populations struggle with increasingly “technocratic top-down, epistemically opaque societies,” — a world where experts and political leaders make complex decisions without transparency and accessibility for the masses — “we are going to see increasing emphasis on ‘naturalness,’ both as a way of keeping us healthy, and also as a way of feeling empowered.”

Unfortunately, the idea that meat today is natural — or could be deindustrialized at our current rate of consumption — is deeply misguided.