Across the far right, a paranoid prophecy has been taking hold: the belief that globalist elites want to take meat off the menu and replace it with insects. The charge has been spouted in one version or another by provocateurs like Tucker Carlson, Mike Cernovich, and Jordan Peterson, and repeated by countless accounts on social media. 

The claim has found its way into the sloganeering of major right-wing political parties around the world, from the Conservative Party of Canada to Lega in Italy, and the Law and Justice party in Poland. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis invoked the specter of insect-eating when he banned the production and sale of cultivated meat in his state.

These claims frequently accompany advocacy for meat-heavy, protein-packed diets — ascendant within the so-called manosphere and across the right more broadly — that ostensibly hearken back to our Paleolithic ancestors, who, the thinking goes, dined on freshly hunted prey instead of the processed slop churned out by our modern food system. Jordan Peterson, for instance, is a vocal proponent of an all-meat carnivore diet, which he compares favorably to the diets of hunter-gatherers and contrasts to contemporary diets he suggests have too many carbohydrates. “Maybe human beings should be in hunting mode all the time,” he said in 2022.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate widely divergent diets shaped by climate, geography, and availability. And while they certainly ate meat, they had no guarantee of successful hunts and scant means of preserving fresh kills. In fact, according to a recent paper in the journal Science Advances, that presents a peculiar twist: Putrefying meat attracted flies, which laid eggs that hatched into maggots, which in turn probably provided a ready source of protein to early hunters. 

Ironically, then, part of the Paleolithic diet likely was bugs.

Carnivore influencers misunderstand not just where ancient humans got their animal protein, but also how much of it they ate. In The Meat Question, a sprawling history of humans’ relationship to meat, anthropologist Josh Berson writes: “If anything, it is ‘modern’ urban populations, particularly in the United States, that exhibit specialization for animal consumption — not the foragers so often held up as models of a meat-eating subsistence strategy.” 

In other words, those who suggest that we’ve fallen from pre-modern meat-eating übermen to plant-gnawing and bug-curious untermen have their history backward. It was only with the advent of modern factory farming that meat became so reliable and ubiquitous that Americans can now eat it three times a day. 

Myths about how we used to eat and, perhaps, should eat again, matter politically now more than ever. The image of prehistoric man the hunter looms over contemporary “gastro-politics,” reflecting pervasive social and political anxieties about the food we eat. The Make America Healthy Again movement has been buoyed by a growing cultural obsession with carnivore and paleo diets and protein — entrails, tallow, and marrow are all chic; there are calls to double down on meat in federal nutrition guidelines. All of it dovetails with a romanticization of “natural” pre-modern food system and a distrust of all things “industrial” and “ultra-processed.” 

And it’s hardly just a right-wing phenomenon. The use of Paleolithic humans as dietary role models isn’t so different from mainstream foodie mantras about ancestral diets like author Michael Pollan’s famous advice: “Don’t eat anything your great-great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” More recently, Pollan has fretted that the environmental benefits of meat alternatives may be offset by vague concerns about the health and safety of their “21 ingredients or whatever.” 

This sort of bias toward the traditional can sometimes result in what we might term “foodie horseshoe theory”: For instance, in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan, a liberal Berkeley professor, idealizes the small-scale livestock rancher Joel Salatin, an anti-government agrarian who appears on carnivore diet advocate Jordan Peterson’s podcast to attack veganism, “globalists,” and processed food alike.

For both left and right, myths about a romanticized past bolster present-day identities, politics, and eating habits while shielding them from debate about the food future we ought to create. Of the many problems with the modern food system, a paucity of meat is not one; research on food’s environmental impacts points us toward the need to massively reduce meat consumption. But tackling that problem, and many others, means we first need to abandon myths rooted in bad history.

What even was the prehistoric diet?

Writing in Scientific American in 2017, in the midst of the paleo diet craze, renowned paleontologist Peter Ungar challenged not just the diet itself but its very epistemological foundations. “What was the ancestral human diet? The question itself makes no sense,” he wrote. What most distinguishes the human diet is its incredible adaptability across time and space. Our ancestors have, over the millennia, adapted to eating what was available in whatever quantities it was available. As Ungar noted, that can mean diets made up of almost entirely animal flesh and fat, or one consisting of mostly roots, tubers, and fruit. Trying to pin down a single “Paleolithic” or “ancestral” diet is impossible.

While the idea of Paleolithic eating summons images of humans as “hypercarnivores,” or apex predators, humans are not naturally obligate carnivores like big cats. We are omnivores, capable of deriving nutrients from a vast variety of plant and animal sources. The role that meat played in our evolution, how much of it we ate, and how we got it (theories of scavenging carrion abound alongside those of near-constant hunting), remains the subject of vigorous debate among scholars, with plausible estimates, depending on the population, time period, and ecological context, ranging from very little to quite a bit. 

Reconstructing ancient dietary patterns and quantities from scant fossilized remains, much less generalizing based on them, is fraught detective work. It sometimes involves, quite literally, sifting through the trash of ancient peoples. Animal bones with damage from fire, teeth, and butchering, for instance, can confirm animals were eaten, although it is difficult to determine frequency and quantity. While modern discussions of Paleolithic diets center on meat from a small number of livestock species farmed and eaten today, our ancestors ate a wide range of creatures, many now extinct or no longer used for food; the archeological record shows that rats, for example, were probably paleo-compliant.

Genomic and proteomic (protein) analyses of fossilized material can also help shed light on ancient diets, and the chemical composition of human bones offers additional clues. The notion among some scholars that early humans ate a superabundance of meat comes not just from ideas about their hunting habits gleaned from the fossil record, but also from high levels of stable nitrogen isotopes in fossilized skeletons, which can suggest high consumption of offal. But science progresses on proposing and testing alternative explanations, and researchers have more recently suggested plants — and, now, maggots — as a source of all that nitrogen. The latter suggestion, put forth in the new Science Advances paper, is rooted in the theory that meat, a relatively scarce resource, would be kept around even as it rotted — not just to be eaten, but also to allow maggots to hatch to provide a steady source of fresh, bite-size protein.

Of course, much of this is educated guesswork. Thus, many theories about ancestral diets are also supplemented with evidence from the eating habits of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, who act as empirically studiable stand-ins for long-gone ancestors. Ungar, for instance, contrasts the largely carnivorous fare of Alaska’s Tikiġaġmiut people with the plant-rich diets of the Gwi San people of the Kalahari. The authors of the Science Advances paper back up their archaeological sleuthing with historical reports of 19th-century Arctic and subarctic hunter-gatherer societies eating maggots growing in stored animal carcasses. Both the fossil and ethnohistorical records, they conclude, reveal early human populations not as hypercarnivores but as omnivorous opportunists.

The closer we come to contemporary society, the more we know with greater certainty about what our ancestors ate. And here, too, the historical record fails to support ideas of persistent carnivory. If anything, the domestication of livestock, which first began to appear in the archaeological record 12,000 years ago, likely diminished meat’s role in human diets: Through millennia, farmed animals were often more valuable alive than dead, as a source of milk, wool, labor, and fertilizer, and as a store of wealth.

In medieval Europe, butchering pigs was a highly seasonal ritual, sometimes reserved for special occasions; in Imperial China, pigs were a symbol of prosperity; throughout much of South Asia, cattle regularly supplied dairy and manure, but beef consumption was forbidden. Far from being a dietary staple, meat’s role was fluid: by turns a sacred offering, a show of wealth, or a winter fallback. And in most cases, meat intake remained relatively low, at least by modern standards, until the very recent past.

It wasn’t until around the turn of the 20th century that animal agriculture was industrialized. The adoption of assembly-line systems in slaughterhouses allowed for economies-of-scale killing of animals and standardization of cuts of meat, while selective breeding practices dramatically enhanced livestock productivity. As historian William Cronon has shown, these advances, coupled with new technology like refrigerated rail cars and canning, quickly turned meat into a ubiquitous commodity. As crop agriculture also industrialized, animal feed became cheap, allowing for the advent of factory farms where animals like pigs and chickens were raised indoors for their entire lives and bred to grow to slaughter weight rapidly.

These extremely recent changes remade humanity’s relationship to meat. Over the past century, the entire agricultural value chain has been redesigned to feed, raise, and kill animals on an ever-greater scale. In 1909, just over 150 million chickens were sold for slaughter in the US. By 1949, that number was close to 600 million. In 2024, it was 9.5 billion. Over the past half-century, American meat production has increased almost threefold and global meat production fivefold, a transformation that geographer Tony Weis has called the “meatification” of our food system.

Modern humans, as much as our Paleolithic ancestors, as much as our great-great-grandparents, adapt our diets to our surroundings. And surrounded by ever-greater quantities of cheap meat, we ate more of it. 

Can we please be serious about food policy?

Modern diets are fraught with anxiety, and with good reason. There is much about modernity and the modern food system to be anxious about, from its contribution to global climate change to the potential health impacts of some food additives.

These are real problems, of course, but an anxious frame rooted in hyperbole, cliche, and nostalgia for free-grazing pigs doesn’t offer a clear perspective on what’s needed to address them. Instead, it serves up simplistic answers, like a wholesale rejection of modernity. But, ironically, hostility toward modern food technology and an effective regulatory state, whether by the foodie gurus, carnivore podcasters, MAHA, raw milk enthusiasts, or DOGE cost-cutters, might very well increase the quantity of rotting meat (and perhaps maggots) in our food, a problem in 19th-century America before the creation of the FDA and the widespread adoption of food refrigeration and preservation technologies.

Consider that the modern food system is, on balance, a great thing. Diseases of malnutrition like pellagra and rickets have been banished to the past, as have the dangers of eating contaminated, toxic, spoiled, or adulterated foods. It is only because food is more abundant, affordable, and safe than at any other time in human history that we can spare any attention to the chronic, long-term problems to which modern diets contribute, like obesity and diabetes. 

Addressing those problems means embracing modernity rather than rejecting it. It requires actually engaging with the complexity of the food system, and facing up to a few uncomfortable truths, like the fact that it is meat in particular, and not food generally, that drives many of the food system’s harms. But in the face of complexity, a retreat to an unspoiled past offers both an escapist fantasy free of difficult tradeoffs and a handy justification for our worst dietary choices. 

In an imagined past, meat consumption acts as a potent political signifier that binds us to our tribe. And food becomes a theater for performing politics and identity. For foodies who sneer at “industrial food,” going back to small farms and eating supposedly “better” organic and regeneratively farmed meat may signal a commitment to personal health and environmental justice that is simply not borne out by science. On the right, the embrace of meat anchors a particular vision of politics — and masculinity — that is fundamentally anti-modern, anti-liberal, and anti-“woke.” And so the modern food system (junk), liberal men (soy boys), and scientists and experts (globalists) can all be framed as an assault on a fundamental and personal bodily practice.

But rather than a transgressive return to a lost past, meat-heavy diets not only represent the status quo but also rely entirely on the modern food system and its globe-spanning networks of exchange, cutting-edge logistics and infrastructure, highly capitalized multinational corporations, and sophisticated biotechnologies. Close factory farms and industrialized cattle feedlots, and 99 percent of chicken, 98 percent of pork, and 75 percent of beef in the US disappear overnight, making mass-scale carnivory impossible. 

Paradoxically, then, those who champion pre-modern diets can do so only because of the amenities and technologies of the modern world. At no other point in human history could someone opt for the meat of their choice for three meals every day, without getting any blood on their own hands, and then post about it on social media to claim they are living like their ancestors. If anything, the myth of meat’s transhistorical importance masks the fact that the meatiness of current diets is a historical flash in the pan, the result of a food system focused on overproducing meat, not an evolved set of inherent needs or preferences.

As is often the case with myths, those about Paleolithic, ancestral, and great-great-grandmotherly diets are more about the anxieties and identities of their purveyors than it is about a real past or even a real present. The very image of the primitive prehistoric hunter is less careful archeology and ethnography than it is a product of modern misconceptions about human evolution mixed with popular culture pastiche, which makes self-styled primitivism quintessentially post-modern, as if the “this is what they took from us” meme was slapped over a picture of Fred Flintstone eating dinosaur ribs. 

History shows us that there is no single way humans have eaten and no predetermined way we should eat. Diets are a product of the world we live in. And in that world, the questions we should be asking are not about what our ancestors ate — and whether we should therefore eat meat, berries, or maggots — but about what rational decisions we can make about our future. That includes asking why meat is so cheap and easy to buy, and whether it ought to remain so. The answers lie in science, public health, and political economy, and not in myths. The diets of the long dead are a red herring at best, red meat for reactionary politics at worst.

As public concern about climate change grows, so does demand for lower-emissions consumer goods. And as major meat producers face the fact that their climate impacts may turn away conscientious consumers, they are increasingly claiming to offer low-carbon meat. 

That includes the Brazilian multinational JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, which in 2021 began claiming that it will achieve net zero emissions by 2040, promising in a full-page New York Times ad that it could serve up “bacon, chicken wings and steak with net-zero emissions.” 

This claim is, on its face, dubious. Meat, especially beef, is by far the food sector’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, and no solution to these emissions exists that would offer significant reductions — except scaling down meat production.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has deemed JBS’s misleading promises serious enough to take the company to court. A lawsuit filed by her office last week alleges that JBS’s claim about emissions reductions is both unsubstantiated and unachievable — and that it may not only mislead consumers into buying its highly polluting products but could also “in effect, provide environmentally conscious consumers with a ‘license’ to eat beef.” 

While some critics may read the suit as an anti-free market move, it is, in reality, the opposite. Functioning markets depend on giving consumers accurate information to be able to make free choices; corporate duplicity undermines the market’s capacity to provide goods they see as preferable.

If successful, the lawsuit would come with financial penalties for JBS and would send a message to other food companies that greenwashing comes with monetary and political costs. In a context where the link between livestock production and climate change is often ignored or underreported, it could also send an important message to the public and policymakers about the prevalence of deception in the stories they are told by the livestock industry.

Why JBS’s net zero promises make no sense

JBS, which was founded in 1953 and is based in São Paulo, Brazil, today sells products in about 180 countries and runs plants and sales offices on nearly every continent through subsidiaries like JBS USA. In 2022, its net income was close to $3 billion. It is one of the biggest beef processors in the US, and a major processor of pork and chicken. 

JBS didn’t respond to Vox’s request for comment in time for publication, but told the Wall Street Journal that it disagreed with James’s lawsuit and that it “will continue to partner with farmers, ranchers and our food system partners around the world to help feed a growing population while using fewer resources and reducing agriculture’s environmental impact.”

But being in the meat business situates JBS in the most environmentally harmful part of the food system. Livestock is responsible for 57 percent of food systems emissions, or about 14.5 percent of all global emissions. Much of this comes from cows, which produce methane when they digest food, but it also comes from factory farms where pigs and chickens are raised and from open air manure lagoons where waste from farmed animals is stored. 

Grazing cattle and growing feed crops for animals, like soy, are also major drivers of deforestation, most notably in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. Among its many harms, deforestation removes a major carbon sink — meaning that not only does livestock production emit greenhouse gases, but the lands cleared for that production also can no longer capture and store planet-warming emissions anywhere near as efficiently as forests. 

Unsurprisingly, JBS’s emissions are gargantuan. In 2021 it reported more than 71 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions — making JBS, as New York’s lawsuit mentions, a larger emitter than the entire country of Ireland. Outside audits have suggested that its emissions are growing at an unchecked pace, increasing by 51 percent between 2016 and 2021. 

With global demand for meat rising, the meat industry is a major impediment to meeting climate targets. Without shifting diets in wealthy countries away from meat and dairy, it would be impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C, a target set by the Paris climate agreement.

JBS’s business model conflicts with that reality, and with any possibility of bringing emissions in line with planetary limits. As New York’s lawsuit bluntly states: “scientists point to the need to reduce production of and demand for ruminant meat, including beef … The JBS Group plans to do the opposite.”  

The case alleges that JBS’s claims — which have appeared on its website and have been repeated in forums including a New York Times event last year — have no basis in fact, and that the company has neither the information nor the means to deliver on its promises because it lacks a complete picture of its own emissions. 

Corporate emissions reporting is usually split into three tranches: Scope 1, which includes direct emissions from company-owned facilities; scope 2, which includes emissions from electricity purchased by the company; and scope 3, which are all other emissions throughout the value chain of the product the company is selling. For meat processors like JBS, scope 3 is highly complex, including things like crops grown to feed animals, deforestation, and methane — and it can make up upward of 90 percent of their emissions. 

JBS has admitted, as noted in the lawsuit, that it lacks the capacity to accurately calculate its scope 3 emissions due to the complexity of its supply chain (which would also suggest its 2021 reported emissions mentioned above are at best an estimate). In short: the company doesn’t have a reliable baseline emissions number from which it could plan to achieve net zero. 

Worse, James’s lawsuit alleges that JBS had no plan for achieving net zero when it announced its commitment. In 2023, two years into making the net zero promise, it was still claiming to be “working to develop a robust net zero roadmap.” 

At a New York Times event last fall, JBS CEO Gilberto Tomazoni said, “The main strategy that we have [to reduce emissions] is to regenerate agriculture.” The company’s website has claimed that JBS will invest $100 million by 2030 in research into “regenerative farming practices.” But while “regenerative” has become something of a catch-all buzzword in agriculture sustainability discourse, the term is infamously slippery, with no clear definition, and therefore no clear ability to quantify its capacity to reduce emissions. 

Given the scale of emissions from animal agriculture, especially beef, it is not clear the means exist to significantly reduce, much less completely offset, emissions using regenerative or any other techniques.

Can litigation hold Big Meat accountable for greenwashing?

The New York lawsuit reflects the emergence of agricultural greenwashing as not just corporate fluff — but as a key area where the law can be used to hold food businesses accountable and protect consumers from having their good intentions exploited.  

Across industries more traditionally associated with pollution, like plastics and fossil fuels, greenwashing is so widely recognized as a problem that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) publishes so-called “Green Guides” to inform companies about how to avoid running afoul of consumer protection laws in their marketing claims. These guides are not legally binding, but they can and have been the basis for class-action lawsuits. While they’ve traditionally focused on issues like recyclability, the environmental law firm Earthjustice has submitted a comment to the FTC calling for the inclusion of agriculture sustainability claims, citing JBS’s net zero promise as an example.

In the meat industry, there’s a parallel history of so-called “humanewashing” — misrepresenting products as coming from happy, free-roaming animals when they actually come from factory farms. Companies are, in effect, shaping their advertising to meet consumer affect: When they see consumer concern about the treatment of animals, they will claim that their animals are raised humanely. As public attention shifts to the carbon emissions of animal agriculture, livestock producers are pivoting to climate-friendly messaging.

Agribusiness already benefits from a lax regulatory environment that may make it especially disposed to this type of greenwashing. Last year, for example, the USDA signed off on a “climate-friendly” beef product marketed by Tyson Foods that claimed to emit 10 percent less than other types of beef even though Tyson did not reveal from what baseline it was reducing emissions, making the reduction claim meaningless. 

In that otherwise inadequate regulatory context, the New York case is serving notice to the livestock industry that government officials are “paying attention to the next and most concerning advertising trend on the part of animal agribusiness,” Amanda Howell, managing attorney for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, which has litigated humanewashing claims against companies like Hormel and Trader Joe’s, told me.

This case is much bigger than just JBS

The lawsuit’s outcome will hinge on whether the attorney general can prove that reasonable consumers could have been misled by JBS’s claims. This is not necessarily a given, as companies sued for greenwashing or humanewashing can argue that they were merely engaging in “puffery,” or slight exaggeration that is accepted in advertising. 

JBS, however, will have to show that it can substantiate its very definite claims about achieving “net zero.” That seems unlikely. This was already the conclusion that the BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division (NAD) made in March 2023, when, based on a complaint filed by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, it called on JBS to stop making such claims because it could not show they were verifiable. But since the NAD’s decision is not legally binding, JBS ignored it.

This case is only the latest in a series of lawsuits that have challenged JBS’s almost comical predilection for fraud. In 2017, JBS S.A., JBS USA’s parent company, was fined $3.2 billion for its role in running a massive bribery operation in Brazil. In 2020, J&F Investimentos, the parent company of JBS S.A., pleaded guilty to bribery charges in the US and was fined $128 million. That same year, Pilgrim’s Pride, a US company owned by JBS, was fined $110 million by the Justice Department for price-fixing in the chicken business. JBS was also sued last year for issuing over $3 billion in “green” bonds linked to its sustainability goals to investors.

The company’s “extensive international corruption record” and environmental impact led Sen. Cory Booker and a bipartisan group of 14 other senators to write to the Securities Exchange Commission earlier this year to ask that JBS not be allowed to issue stock on the New York Stock Exchange. For now, the company’s US stock issue has been delayed.

The lawsuit against JBS is ultimately about much more than JBS alone. Given the lack of clear regulatory commitment on the part of entities like the USDA, litigation may be a valuable tool to signal to Big Meat that they are being watched and that there are consequences for lying about their climate commitments. 

Meanwhile, the publicity from the case can also send a message to two distinct audiences. First, the general public, informing them to be wary of sustainability pleas from the livestock industry. And second, policymakers themselves.

“I think a big potential indirect impact is a bit of education of policymakers. Congress gives special exemptions to animal ag in part because they don’t know, or don’t want to believe, the real climate and pollution impact,” Peter Lehner, managing attorney at Earthjustice, told me. “So I hope this will get a few more policymakers to understand that industrial ag is just that — another highly polluting industry.”

Plant-based meat has gone mainstream. The Impossible Burger, which debuted at a single restaurant five years ago, is now on Burger King’s permanent menu. And McDonald’s is testing its McPlant burger, featuring a Beyond Meat patty, in select US locations. Both plant-based startups are now veterans in a product category that did $1.4 billion in sales and grew 27 percent in 2020. 

Under the tagline “Eat Meat. Save the Planet,” Impossible Foods claims its soy-based burger uses 87 percent less water, takes 96 percent less land, and has 89 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions than a beef burger. Beyond Meat makes similar claims about its pea-based burgers. 

This matters because animal agriculture contributes around 15 percent of global greenhouse emissions, and experts agree that without a major shift away from meat in our diets, we won’t be able to meet the global community’s climate targets. The promise of plant-based faux meats is that consumers will be able to keep enjoying the foods they love, but with a far lower climate footprint.

But an increasing number of researchers, food critics, and environmental groups are casting doubt on these types of claims, warning that faux meat production still relies on industrial farming practices. They claim that we don’t know enough about these relatively new products to say for certain if they’re better for the environment than the meat they are trying to replace. 

One recent whitepaper from an environmental NGO states that the above claims from faux meat companies “are unproven, and some clearly untrue.” A sustainability analyst quoted in the New York Times goes further, claiming that the companies’ secrecy about their production methods means that “We don’t feel we have sufficient information to say Beyond Meat is fundamentally different from JBS.” (JBS is the world’s largest meat producer).

But years of research on the environmental impact of food make one thing clear: Plant proteins, even if processed into imitation burgers, have smaller climate, water, and land impacts than conventional meats. Apart from environmental impact, reducing meat production would also reduce animal suffering and the risk of both animal-borne disease and antibiotic resistance. The criticisms against the new wave of meatless meat appear to be more rooted in broad opposition to food technology rather than a true environmental accounting — and they muddy the waters in the search for climate solutions at a time when clarity is sorely needed.

The climate impact of animal meat versus plant-based meat, explained

Americans eat well over 200 pounds of meat each per year, and it’s accelerating us along a collision course with climate catastrophe. While many other countries eat far less meat, global appetites are catching up quickly, spurred especially by the growing affluence of the rising middle class in Asia and Latin America. 

Fossil fuels do make up a far greater proportion of emissions in the US and globally, but even if we reduced energy emissions down to zero, demand for meat and dairy alone could make us exceed critical levels of global warming. That makes shifting diets away from meat a critical tool in preventing global temperatures from rising above 1.5°C or 2°C by 2100. 

There are a number of reasons for meat’s outsized ecological footprint. The first is that cows belch out methane created from fermenting grassy food in their multi-chambered stomachs. With a billion and a half cows on the planet — raised for both beef and dairy — that adds up to about 9 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions alone.

Although pigs and chickens, the two most farmed species on the planet, don’t belch methane, they still produce lots of manure — and that generates nitrous oxide, another potent greenhouse gas. They also need to eat fertilized crops, like corn and soy, which generate more emissions. And while all cattle graze on grass, most in the United States are eventually fattened for slaughter on feedlots where they too eat corn and soy.

Feeding all of these crops to animals is far less efficient than feeding them more directly to humans. For example, every 12 calories from corn and soy fed to a pig provides just one calorie of meat back. The proposition of plant-based meats is that they cut out the animal, allowing more efficient use of land and resources.

Different animal products have vastly different emissions. For instance, pigs and chickens emit far less than cows and sheep. But according to recent peer-reviewed research from the University of Oxford and Johns Hopkins University, which compiled several estimates, all of these animal foods (except some chicken) generate more emissions than plant-based meats. (Editor’s note: Jan Dutkiewicz, one of the authors of this article, was a co-author on the Johns Hopkins paper.)

This research consisted of meta-analyses of multiple life-cycle assessments, or LCAs, which measure the total environmental impact of a product. While some of the plant-based meat estimates were commissioned by the faux meat companies themselves, including Beyond and Impossible, others were not, and all used internationally agreed-upon LCA standards for accounting of every emission source throughout processing. 

Even the lowest-emitting beef from dedicated beef herds (34 kg carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2e) and lower-emitting beef from dairy cow herds (15 kg CO2e) came in far above the highest-emitting tofu (4 kg CO2e) and plant-based meat (7 kg).

Chicken and pork production emit far less CO2 equivalent than beef. And while there is some overlap (the lowest-emitting chicken [3.2 kg CO2e] and pork [6 kg CO2e] rival the emissions of the highest-emitting plant-based meat), the average emissions of tofu and plant-based meats are still lower than the average emissions of both chicken and pork. 

Of course, climate emissions aren’t the only environmental impacts from food. Producing animal-based food also requires large quantities of fresh water. For instance, one kilogram of pork requires 442 liters of water, versus 84 liters for one kilogram of plant-based meat. Similarly, producing beef, pork, and chicken requires far more land and causes much more pollution to waterways than plant-based alternatives. 

How techno-skepticism muddles the environmental debate over plant-based meat

Despite the clear evidence that plant-based meats are generally better for the environment, criticism persists, and some of it is rooted in techno-skepticism — the attitude that because most plant-based meat is made using similar industrial farming and food-processing techniques as animal meat, it too is highly problematic. 

It’s true that just like feed crops for farm animals, most faux meats are made with soy or wheat (or peas, in the case of Beyond Meat), and are grown as monoculture crops, meaning they’re grown in large fields that consist of just one mechanically farmed plant. Monoculture farming has long been criticized by environmental advocates for causing soil degradation and requiring a lot of pesticides, among other problems. A further extension of the criticism is that monocultured crops are usually the product of genetic modification, or GMOs.

While the safety of genetic modification itself has been well established, some of the intensive farming practices associated with growing certain GMO crops have come under fire from environmental NGOs and champions of organic farming. Plant-based meat companies take very different stances on using GMOs, with Impossible Foods embracing the technology and Beyond Meat going GMO-free. 

However, the vast majority of chicken and pork requires more crops in the form of animal feed than what is contained in an equivalent serving of plant-based meat — and that’s almost always more monoculture GMO crops. Paradoxically, if you want to eat something meaty, a great way to reduce your monoculture (and GMO) intake is to eat faux meats.

To be sure, exclusively grass-fed beef doesn’t use any monocultured feed. But it’s sold at a premium price, and scaling up its production to meet current demand for beef would require multiple times more land than is already used, making this a dead-end proposition (unless we also drastically reduce consumption).

Critics of plant-based meat have also pointed out that it tends to be highly processed. No doubt, most plant-based meats are not health foods, due to their high saturated fat and salt (though beef and pork, too, are high in saturated fat). But “processed foods” is a vague and often ill-defined term that encompasses everything from high-fructose corn syrup to whole-grain pasta to yogurt, and has little bearing on foods’ environmental impact. As Vox’s Kelsey Piper has written, the term “processed food” “can obscure more than it clarifies” when it comes to the debate over plant-based meat. 

What “corporate sustainability” measurements get wrong about the environmental impact of food

The final major critique of plant-based meat revolves around transparency. 

This critique is raised both by some food NGOs and by a niche group of professional ESG (environmental, social, governance) corporate analysts. These analysts are paid by conscientious investors to rank companies by the riskiness of their supply chains. This is an important and growing space, but corporate ESG analysis still has major problems and limitations.

Some corporate sustainability analysts have criticized plant-based companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat for not precisely and continuously reporting climate impacts across their supply chains, like packaging, transporting, and processing. As noted earlier, when speaking to the New York Times for a recent article, one ESG analyst said that Beyond Meat and JBS are not “fundamentally different.”

One academic researcher called these products a “black box,” claiming that “much of what is in these products is undisclosed.” These kinds of statements are hyperbolic, akin to saying a gas-guzzling SUV and an electric car are similar because the companies that make them don’t reveal the emissions that come from producing the specific microchips they use.

It’s true that ingredient labels can’t tell us precisely where and under what conditions a given ingredient, like soybeans or coconut oil, was grown, and most meat and faux-meat companies don’t disclose emissions throughout their entire supply chain and manufacturing. These details aren’t trivial, and emissions across manufactured food production can likely stand to be improved. 

But because corporate ESG is a niche space, its demands for transparency often revolve around details that investors want to see, including small tweaks and changes in production processes, while potentially missing the lion’s share of the real environmental impacts. When it comes to plant-based burgers, we already know most of the impacts and where they are coming from. According to FDA regulations, food companies must list all ingredients on product labels, meaning that much of the “black box” of plant-based protein can be unlocked simply by looking at the back of a package. 

Labels on conventional meat also do not disclose all the inputs and processes that went into producing it. If you’re eating a Beyond Burger, you might not know exactly where its peas come from or how it was packaged, but you would know that peas were the most-used crop ingredient. If you’re eating canned pork from Hormel, the maker of Spam — which one sustainability analysis firm rated as much lower-risk than Beyond Meat when it comes to their reputational risks like harming workers or the environment — you nonetheless wouldn’t know what their pigs ate or, for that matter, how those pigs were treated.

The fact is that the overwhelming majority of the environmental impacts of our food are a result of what happens on farms, not in manufacturing or shipping. For example, a local, grass-fed burger is going to cause more emissions than, say, a pea-based burger or manufactured block of tofu trucked in from 1,000 miles away. With meat, most of the impact is from the cow belches, the feed crop production, the polluting manure, and the deforestation required to make way for ever-increasing production. 

As seen in the chart above, packaging and transport emissions across different kinds of meats and plant foods are pretty consistent, never going above 2 kg CO2e per kg of product. 

However, the emissions for land use, farming, and feed range greatly among foods, from 0.7 kg CO2e for peas to more than 57 kg CO2e for beef.

Put differently, packaging, transport, and processing make up a large percentage of tofu’s emissions only because soy’s overall production emissions are already very low. In order for plant-based meats to even approach beef’s environmental impact, they would need to have a manufacturing footprint at least 10 times higher than that of tofu.

All of these criticisms may have more to do with techno-skepticism than scientific rigor. The discourse against technological “frankenfoods” is a longstanding one that contrasts bucolic images of “real food” and “real farms” with labs, factories, and smog. The real story isn’t so simple. And while many of the harms from food production are industrial in origin, we can also thank technology for major advances in food safety like pasteurization — and for the creation of faux meats that, while imperfect, give people a more sustainable alternative to animal-based meat. 

None of this is to say that makers of plant-based meat alternatives can shirk transparency. Companies that are serious about making big sustainability claims should strive to win the public’s trust through greater transparency of their entire production chains, including not simply emissions but other impacts like labor practices and manufacturing waste. Nonetheless, we currently know enough to conclude that plant-based meats’ climate impacts are smaller than those of conventional meat, even if the precision of their monitoring could be improved. 

Why other ethical impacts get left out of the equation

Beyond climate and pollution, there are a host of other impacts corporate sustainability evaluators and public interest groups should consider in their assessments, including animal-borne disease and animal welfare.

Most meat eaten by Americans comes from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) where animals have scant legal protections. This barren legal landscape has led to a race to the bottom on animal welfare, resulting in animals bred to grow so fast that their vital organs can painfully lose function, or they can barely walk without pain. Animals’ natural behaviors are restricted by confining them in cages too small to turn around or spread their wings. 

It’s unsurprising, then, that footage depicting neglect and mistreatment of pigs, chickens, and cows on industrial farms has caused reputational damage to the food companies that were unaware of or unconcerned about practices on the farms from which they source. For instance, the dairy company Fairlife faced protests and lawsuits after undercover footage apparently showed abuse at a farm from which it sourced milk.

Because of this reputational risk, the meat lobby has pushed states to pass “ag-gag” laws criminalizing private investigations and whistleblowing on animal farms, which have only worsened the pressing transparency issue across North American animal farms. 

Another risk in factory farming (for which there’s no equivalent in plant-based food manufacturing) is pandemic risk. The confined conditions that create animal welfare problems on intensive farms also increase the risk of animal-borne diseases. Thousands of animals are kept in quarters close to each other and their waste, allowing pathogens ample opportunity to propagate and undergo mutations that can jump to workers and communities near production facilities.

Spillover of avian flu strains from chickens to humans is an ever-present possibility, which has seen sporadic outbreaks around the world, exacerbated by the closely confined and often unsanitary conditions in which billions of chickens live on meat and egg farms.

And diseases that don’t spread to humans are also a near-constant risk to the business of industrial farming and our food supply. The ongoing African Swine Fever pandemic alone has claimed the lives of hundreds of millions of pigs, with preventative pig culling the only existing measure to control disease spread, causing tens of billions of dollars in losses in Asia alone.

Antibiotic resistance is another potentially existential threat that can emerge on industrial animal farms. Antibiotics are a basic and critical tool in modern medicine and also our last line of defense against many diseases. 

However, the majority of antibiotics produced globally are used on farmed animals to prevent bacterial outbreaks and boost animal growth, and their chronic use creates new antibiotic-resistant strains of harmful and potentially deadly bacteria. 

Already, 700,000 people die each year of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including 35,000 in the United States. The World Health Organization has specifically called for the phaseout of farms’ unnecessary antibiotic use to reduce this risk because we don’t have an alternative — an antibiotics 2.0 — if antibiotic resistance keeps increasing as it has.

Disease and animal mistreatment are directly relevant to sustainability and to companies’ material and reputational risks, but meat companies have generally sought to avoid addressing them as they would make their operations more costly and less efficient.

Sustainability firms and other industry watchdogs, meanwhile, have not quantified these impacts, with some exceptions. There are a few reasons for this, including that it’s difficult to put concrete numbers on risks of zoonotic disease outbreaks (which are sporadic and hard to predict), as well as animal welfare. If sustainability firms could track companies’ non-climate risks better, we may have very different conceptions regarding which have riskier production processes and which are more sustainable.

More broadly, there is a pressing need to widen the debate over food sustainability. Fish, for instance, may have lower greenhouse gas emissions, but overfishing is harming fragile ocean ecosystems. Replacing beef with chicken might reduce climate emissions, but chickens are raised in worse conditions, have more viral outbreaks, and are given more than three times the antibiotics that cattle are — and far more chickens would have to be killed to create the same amount of meat. If emissions, animal welfare, and disease risks were all considered, neither chicken nor beef looks all that good. 

Narrow sustainability measurements and techno-skepticism have clouded the public conversation about plant-based meats. Claims that these products might not be much better for the environment than meat goes against extensive, peer-reviewed research.

This is not to say that Beyond and Impossible burgers are the optimal choice. Taking a broad view of sustainability that includes emissions, environmental impacts, animal welfare, and animal-borne disease risk mitigation, the clear winner is a diet based on whole plant foods — just vegetables, grains, fruits, and legumes. 

Such a diet, widely recommended by environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund, is likely best for individual and planetary health. But plant-based meats are designed to fill a role that just plants often can’t: easily appealing to meat-loving taste buds and dietary habits with little culinary finessing required. The additional environmental price paid for this convenience and pleasure still leaves faux meats far better for the planet (and animals) than conventional meats. The science there is clear.

Matthew Hayek is an assistant professor of environmental science in the department of Environmental Studies at New York University and Affiliated Faculty at the NYU Center for Data Science.

Jan Dutkiewicz is a policy fellow at the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School and a postdoctoral researcher with the Swiss National Science Foundation.