“Truth comes to us mediated by love” – A. N. Wilson.

Dear Climate Healers,

Is Meat Humanity’s Favorite Food? Bruce Friedrich thinks so.

I claim that’s cultural programming, not biological truth.

Calling meat “humanity’s favorite food” confuses habit with preference. What many of us grew up eating was shaped by culture, power, marketing, and availability, and not by an innate human desire to consume animals. Across most of human history, and still for much of the world today, people have relied primarily on plant foods for nourishment. When people are given genuine choice, honest information, and access to satisfying vegan meals, their tastes adapt quickly. What humans consistently value, across cultures and eras, is connection, care, and avoiding unnecessary harm. Our food traditions can evolve to reflect those deeper values without losing pleasure, nourishment, or meaning.

Indeed, “Humanity’s favorite food” varies dramatically by geography, history, and culture, but as the late Dr. John McDougall pointed out, it is invariably starch-based. Rice feeds more people than any meat. Bread has been called the “staff of life” for millennia. From potatoes in South America to wheat in the Middle East, and corn in Central America, starch-based diets have sustained human civilization for ages. Billions of humans throughout history have eaten plant-rich diets, not from deprivation, but from culinary tradition, religious practice, or simple ecological reality.

The claim that meat is humanity’s favorite food reveals several things:

Firstly, it confuses elite preferences with universal human nature. Industrial meat consumption is a recent phenomenon. Most humans throughout most of history ate meat sparingly, as flavoring, or as occasional food, or not at all. The idea that humans naturally crave meat daily is marketing, not anthropology.

Secondly, it ignores that “favorite” is manufactured. Massive subsidies make meat artificially cheap. Advertising budgets in the billions promote it. Cultural messaging links it to masculinity, status, and tradition. Externalized costs due to health impacts, environmental destruction, and animal suffering are hidden. Make beans as cheap and meat as expensive as true costs warrant, spend equal marketing dollars, and I bet you will see preferences shift.

Thirdly, it assumes that current preferences are immutable. Humans also once “loved” slavery, burning witches, and bloodsport. Cannibals loved to eat other humans. We matured out of those practices. Taste preferences adapt remarkably fast, typically within weeks of dietary change. What people “love” is largely what they’re habituated to and what their culture valorizes.

Fourthly, it perpetuates the protein myth, that protein is only found in meat or in specially processed plant foods that are made to look and taste like meat. It ignores the fact that all plant foods have all essential and non-essential amino acids, which is why gorillas and elephants grow so big eating just wholesome plant foods.

Finally, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we accept that meat is humanity’s favorite food, we don’t question the system producing it. We treat industrial animal agriculture as satisfying natural desire rather than manufacturing desire to maintain a profitable system. The framing serves industry and exploitative interests, not truth.

I claim that humans love pleasure, flavor, satisfaction, cultural connection, and shared meals. We can get all of that from plants without centering meat. We don’t love meat. We’re habituated to it, subsidized toward it, and marketed into believing that we need it.

That’s legalized addiction, not love.

With much love,