In May, the meat lovers came to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, for Meatstock 2026 – a celebration of brisket, bacon, butter and the carnivore life, complete with novelty apparel, an assortment of raw milks and, naturally, large steaks. But mixed in among the meat evangelists, as The New Lede reported on 8 June, were people with real political weight: Calley Means, a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Vani Hari, the “Food Babe”, who has repeatedly called on White House officials to strip artificial dyes and pesticides from the American food supply.
Both are figures in Make America Healthy Again – MAHA – a slogan-driven coalition that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., himself a carnivore-diet adherent, promoted and kickstarted.. The movement is broad: some factions target ultra-processed foods, some pesticides, a vocal segment questions vaccines. One thread runs through nearly all of them – Americans should eat “real food”, and real food includes meat – and that conviction now shapes federal nutrition and health policy. “It culminated in this union between Bobby Kennedy and President Trump and, wherever you are on the political aisle, that has created this unique societal moment where this is at the top of the national discussion,” Means told a 2 May panel at the festival.
Here is the conundrum the movement now sits on. MAHA voices champion leaving “industrial farms” for regenerative agriculture – soil health, cover crops, less tillage, pasture-raised animals – yet American meat demand, present and future, runs almost entirely on concentrated animal feeding operations, the CAFOs where nearly all American farmed animals now live. By one analysis of USDA data, CAFOs supply nearly all chicken and turkey meat, 75% of cow beef and more than 98% of hog meat. The pasture cannot take up the slack: one beef study found “all of the pastureland that US beef currently uses can sustainably deliver 45% of current production”, a prior one put the ceiling at 27%, and 2020 research found regenerative beef needs as much as 2.5 times more land than the conventional kind. “We can’t sustain the amount of animal products that Americans are consuming right now, let alone more, without the industrial model,” said Brent Kim, an assistant scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Closer to home, the industrial model has a pollution bill, and communities are the ones paying it. CAFO manure loads waterways with nitrate, which can starve babies’ blood of oxygen – “blue baby syndrome” – and is linked to bladder, ovarian and colorectal cancers. Iowa, the state with the most CAFOs, heard from a March report that manure-borne nitrates, alongside pesticides and other contaminants, are a culprit in its rising cancer rates; and in late May the utility serving Des Moines asked residents to use less water, because nitrate levels had overwhelmed its treatment capacity. An April study led by Yale researchers found elevated cancer rates among people living near CAFOs in California, Texas and Iowa, and more than 80 health and environmental groups have petitioned HHS and the EPA to use emergency powers against what they call a “public health emergency” in drinking water. CAFOs also feed particulate air pollution linked to breathing and heart trouble. HHS, for its part, did not respond to requests for comment on where CAFOs fit in the MAHA agenda.
The stakes are dietary policy itself. New U.S. dietary guidelines released in January emphasize animal protein, and Kennedy has promised they will “revolutionize” the nation’s food culture – while the movement’s own Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment skipped the meat-production data entirely, except a note that four firms control 80% of the market. Health experts caution that red and processed meats carry higher risks of heart disease and certain cancers. Dr. Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine compares the industry to “the tobacco growers who for generations were raising tobacco until us killjoy scientists came out of here”. New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle says the guidelines’ protein push “is really about red meat”, and her read on the blind spot is blunt: “Everybody knows what animals are so, in their mind, animals are okay”, while “Few people know what chemicals are, so, in their mind, chemicals are not okay.” The festival offered its own testimony on the other side: “I cut out all processed foods and I went to meat and vegetables and some fruit … and it just transformed my health in like a month,” podcaster Mikhaila Peterson said on the MAHA panel, crediting the change with putting her arthritis and chronic fatigue into remission.
What it means for people is visible in the shopping data: meat eating is at record levels, with sales hitting $112 billion in 2025 and most Americans telling the Food Industry Association survey that meat belongs in a healthy diet. Zen Honeycutt of Moms Across America, Meatstock’s opening speaker, traces part of the surge to “concerns that Big Ag created” with pesticides and ultra-processed food, concedes the demand “is problematic for pastureland and resources that are decreasingly available”, and still insists “There has to be a better way.” Hari rejects the binary too – “I reject the idea that we only have two options: factory farming or eliminating animal protein” – and points to real shifts, like a burger chain going all grass-fed, and a USDA $700 million regenerative pilot that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins calls “another initiative driven by President Trump’s mission to Make America Healthy Again.” Republishing the investigation, the finance blog Naked Capitalism was less charitable, calling MAHA “a con” and noting Kennedy “has copyrighted the label and collects licensing fees for its use”. For the families queued at the tap rather than the brisket stand, the question is simpler: whether a movement built on clean food will look at what the industrial model leaves in the water.
Sources
- MAHA’s CAFO conundrum – The New Lede
- MAHA’s Meat-Loving Industrial Farming Hypocrisy | naked capitalism
