From foodandwine.com
By Eve Turow-Paul
Between the MAHA movement and proteinmaxxing, it might seem like we’re eating less plants, but the data says otherwise
In the middle of “MAHAspital,” a now-infamous Saturday Night Live skit, a doctor learns that a patient on life support is vegan. He pulls the plug. As she flatlines, the doctor shrugs and says, “Nothing we could do.” Cue the laugh track. This 10-second clip sums up the current attitude toward plant-based eating. Just a few years ago, people were lining up around the block to try KFC’s Beyond Fried Chicken, and the term “plant-based” was inescapable.
Now, it seems like everyone has a cousin who used to be vegan but can’t help but eat meat again, and the number of Americans who identify strictly as vegetarian and vegan is the lowest since Gallup began tracking it. Google searches for “protein” — a term most often associated with meat in the American psyche, according to an IFIC assessment — hit an all-time high in the spring of this year. Meanwhile, the USDA released an inverted food pyramid placing meat and full-fat dairy at the top, and a “boy kibble” trend encouraged people to eat sautéed ground beef with rice three times a day on TikTok.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that plant-based eating is dead, and that all your friends, family, and favourite influencers are tossing T-bones and half-and-half into their shopping carts. The thing is, you’d probably be wrong.
Protein is everything, meat isn’t
I have been tracking food trends for the better part of the last 15 years, most recently as the founder and executive director of BITE: Building Impact Through Eaters. Over time, it has become harder, not easier, to get a sense of what Americans are actually eating. Most social media algorithms are no longer built to show us what our friends are posting. Instead, we get fed posts by those whose opinions garner the most eyeballs and “likes,” which tend to be the most extreme. Right now, that means raw liver and ground beef breakfasts.
And if you just look at dollars, it indeed looks like beef has taken over American diets, but the data is somewhat misleading: Beef is much more expensive now than it was a year ago. In actual volume, pounds of fresh beef sold rose just over 4% in 2025. Is that significant? For sure. Is it transformational? Nope. For comparison, the volume of peaches sold was up 23.5%, and organic produce — which includes both fruits and vegetables — grew 5% in volume in 2025.
Earlier this year, to explore some of these disparities, BITE looked into the protein trend. We analysed social media influencers and the topics they write about, and what we saw was pretty striking. People are preoccupied with protein, not necessarily meat. In fact, we saw that the vast majority of Americans didn’t have strong feelings about getting their protein from meat versus plants; they’re open to it all. They might think of meat first, but when presented with other solutions to hit their protein goal — spirulina! moringa! chickpeas! — they’re all ears. Well, almost.
Less fake meat, more beans
Alternative meat products, like Beyond and Impossible, have very clearly fallen out of favour with the American public. Beyond Meat’s revenue has been sliding for four straight years, down nearly 40% from its 2021 peak, and its stock spent most of last year trading for less than a drugstore candy bar.
In the last three years, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has put “ultraprocessed foods” — or UPFs — into mainstream vocabulary. It is a term that many now associate with the meat alternatives that ferment, extrude, and mix plant ingredients to form an end product that convincingly mimics meat but is cooked up in a lab.
But despite the decline in alt-meat sales, the broader “plant protein” segment is actually expanding.
The data shows that Americans are eating fewer plant-based burgers and more tofu. bhofack2 / Getty Images
Sales of plant-based creamers and yogurt continue to climb, according to the Good Food Institute, and the category with the largest gains is a completely unexpected one: tofu. Sales of unseasoned plain tofu grew by a whopping 10% in 2024, notes the Plant Based Foods Association.
Then, of course, there are actual plants. The 2025 Plant-Forward Opportunity Report, run by food service market research firm Datassential with contributions from partners including BITE, found that far more Americans planned to order more meals with beans, lentils, and/or legumes than with plant-based meat alternatives.
“Plant-based 1.0 failed, in my opinion, because it was too engineered and anonymous,” says Kevin Ryan, CEO of Malachite Strategy & Research. “Plant-based 2.0 is about making the plant the recognizable trust element.” In other words, people will just take the plants as they are.
I would agree, and have another theory to go alongside it.
Gen Z is rejecting labels
The plant-based movement was led by the millennial generation, the generation I belong to, and whose food habits I’ve written about extensively. Our age group served as guinea pigs for the digital age. Encouraged to build countless online profiles, we grew up in an era of identity labels, often attached to our food choices. It became commonplace to read someone’s profile and see something along the lines of, “I’m Trevor, a Paleo rock-climber from Denver,” or, “I’m Suzanne, a vegan bookstore owner from Ojai.”
We categorized ourselves with endless virtue signals performed through posts, profile descriptions, and yes, our food. The 2010s were the heyday of avocado toast, kale salads, and cronuts, and each post alerted followers to something about us: I’m trendy, I’m wealthy, I’m creative.
In the last decade, many studies have documented that anxiety and depression have worsened, both among millennials and Gen Z. Groceries have become more expensive, housing more elusive, the political climate more ominous, and the atmospheric climate less predictable. And many have become too burnt out to continue the performance.
Now, Gen Z is rejecting labels, be it around politics, gender, or diet. But the rejection of the “plant-based” labels does not equate to the rejection of plants. People just aren’t willing to keep boxing themselves in.
Vegetables are no longer on the side. The most significant shift in plant-rich eating is “the rejection of the idea that you have to give anything up,” says Huy Do, a trendologist at Datassential. People are done with sacrifice; they want something that ticks all the boxes — something that’s affordable, healthy, indulgent, and comforting all at once, and that comes without an identity to perform. This may be why plant-based dairy has escaped the alt-meat downfall; drinking soy or oat milks has never meant you had to don the vegan hat.
The latest data — and menus — reflect this rejection of traditional labels.
In the yet-to-be-released 2026 Plant-Forward Opportunity Report, Datassential and collaborators found that nearly 60% of Americans are interested in trying more dishes in which whole plant proteins play a bigger role than meat; almost the same number are open to reducing how much meat they eat in some meals, even if not all. The percent of Americans looking to “order more naturally plant-based dishes (chana masala, falafel, etc.)” is up 9 points as well from 2024. Dishes like shakshuka, esquites, and gobi manchurian (a fried cauliflower appetizer) are popping up on menus across the country in response to this demand for plant-rich dishes.
Putting the emphasis on plant proteins represents a significant evolution in food culture — a departure from the haute cuisine movement of French cooking that placed beef, chicken, and fish at the centre of the plate and labelled vegetables as “accompaniments.”
Ironically, the shift away from absolutist labels “creates a more hospitable environment for genuinely plant-rich eating than the sacrifice-and-substitution model ever did,” says Do. According to BITE’s own research, the shift toward eating more whole foods is happening among people who would never call themselves “plant-based”: carnivores, keto-dieters, and MAHA advocates alike.
Which brings us back to that doctor pulling the plug. The labels that used to come with plant-based eating are — without question — subsiding. That’s the version of plant-based that actually died. What’s alive and well is dal on a Tuesday because it sounds good, not because it says anything about you. It’s a tofu scramble because you want to amp up your morning protein and fibre intake. It’s beans because beans are $4 a pound, and you want to make something your nana used to feed you. The data backs this up again and again: People aren’t done with plants. They’re done being asked to wave a flag of identity politics just to be allowed to eat them.
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