You Can’t Defend Industrial Food Without Defending Industrial Meat
A Review of Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg’s Feed the People
Eat real food. It’s the closest thing American alternative food politics has to a creed, and for the better part of two decades it belonged to the left. To eat real food was to opt out of industrial agriculture, to refuse the long ingredient list and the seed oils and the corn-fed beef, and in doing so, to register a quiet protest against the system that produced them. It was, we were told, a progressive politics—an alliance of small farmers, conscientious eaters, and environmentalists against the depredations of Big Ag.
That coalition is gone, but the phrase is not. Today “real food” is the rallying cry of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, repeated by Calley and Casey Means, endorsed by RFK Jr., and dispensed on Instagram by suburban moms warning each other about Froot Loops and Doritos. The vocabulary has barely changed—wholesome, clean, natural, traditional, ingredients your grandmother would recognize—but the political reality is far from the same.
Into this altered reality, Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg released Feed The People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make it Better, a book-length appeal to the alternative food movement to reconsider their long-running critiques of industrial agriculture. But, while Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg provide a useful new lens to understand the values of industrial food production, they stop short of defending the food system as a whole. Industrial food is good, they proffer, except for the meat and dairy products that remain fundamental to the American farm economy and diets.
While it is abundantly clear that animal agriculture has problems—high emissions compared to other foods, staggering land and water use, and, of course, animal welfare concerns—a defense of industrial food production that does not include industrial meat and dairy production raises a question. If technologically advanced, large-scale, highly capitalized modes of production provide the solutions to the problems caused by agriculture in general, why would these systems not also provide the solutions to the problems caused by animal agriculture in particular?
Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg likely wrote most of Feed the People before the sudden rise of MAHA, which is distinct from foodie environmentalism mostly in its zeal for animal-based protein. That makes their book’s inconsistencies when it comes to meat production all the more glaring. Offering a tractable alternative to anti-industrial foodie politics requires now, more than ever, an embrace of the efficiencies, innovation, and regulatory leverage available only through factory farms.
Who’s Opposed to Industrial Food?
Make no mistake, Feed the People is an important book. In it, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg lay out a strong argument for a different approach to the food debate. Their “democratic hedonism” thesis, defined as “an approach to politics that sees moral value in the simple pleasures that people experience in their daily lives” (18), represents a humanist opposition to the ascetic and judgmental moralizing of alternative foodies who preach organic, farm-to-table, and wholesome.
There are, as Feed the People demonstrates, pleasures inherent to the industrial food system. According to Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg, those pleasures—whether from a late-night Waffle House run or a bodega egg sandwich—ought to be defended, and made accessible to all in a fashion that reduces their harm. But the accessibility of those pleasures depends on the large-scale, hyper-efficient food production systems that critics label as “industrial.”
Through this framework, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg lay out the absurdities of the various arguments against industrial food production. The “family farm” of foodie nostalgia accounts for a vanishingly small share of American agriculture, and the farmers markets that have proliferated in its name feed a narrow, largely affluent slice of the country. A system built on small, local producers simply cannot move enough calories at low enough prices to deliver the pleasures the authors defend. The point is not that we should reluctantly accept fast food and processed snacks as inferior substitutes for “real” or “slow” food; it is that virtually all of our food—fresh broccoli no less than Hostess Cup Cakes —is a product of the industrial food system in the first place.
In this effort, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are doing real, important work. The myths proffered by the likes of Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, still hold sway over a large swath of the ostensibly progressive population. Debunking the progressive foodie narrative from a progressive, justice-oriented perspective is crucial to reframing the question of the future of food and agriculture for the American left.
But, while anti-industrial faux-progressivism did indeed dominate foodie politics for decades, the movement that Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg have targeted has already lost its influence. Berry, Pollan, and Waters are still wrong, but the energetic core of the anti-industrial food movement has completely migrated right-ward. And so too has the underlying debate.
Progressives can read this migration two ways. The flattering reading is that the food movement has been hijacked. The more correct reading is that food politics was never really progressive in the first place. It was a politics of purity and disgust dressed in progressive clothes, and the clothes have finally come off. MAHA, the manosphere foodies, and the suburban mom alternative eaters did not pervert the once liberal and righteous food movement—they unmasked its immanent conservatism. But, more than anything, the MAHA movement completely changed the food discourse.
As recently as 2024, the debate over industrial food was an intra-progressive argument with broadly shared premises. Everyone at the table—vegans, effective altruists, environmentalists, alternative foodies, food justice folks—agreed that factory farms were bad, that the modern American diet contained too much meat, and that the future, whatever it looked like, would involve eating further down the food chain. The disagreements were about scale, technology, and means: lentils versus cell-cultured beef, smaller dairies or ranches versus veganism. How to solve the “meat problem” was hotly debated, but almost everyone in the alternative food movement agreed it was a problem.
MAHA has rearranged that table. While MAHA glorifies the small, regenerative farmers, few MAHA voices go so far as to directly criticize or target large-scale animal agriculture in their screeds. And, there is little to no acceptance of the idea that eating meat is somehow bad for people, or the environment, let alone, the animals themselves. Instead, MAHA has reshaped American food politics around something a bit harder to quantify: health and nutrition.
No longer made up of coastal-progressives, the anti-industrial food coalition is now a more politically potent alliance of wellness influencers, anti-vaccine activists, libertarian homesteaders, and suburban parents who believe the food system is poisoning their children. Far from agreeing that meat is a fundamental problem that must be solved, many of the MAHA-inflected anti-industrial foodies laud meat—especially beef—and dairy products as the key to American health.
The Meat Problem
The meat question remains the sub-text underlying most debates around food. This is true for Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg. While Feed the People aims to defend industrial food production, it is assuredly not defending all industrial food production.
As longtime advocates for alternative proteins, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg made their position on meat eating and production abundantly clear long before they published Feed the People. In venues like The New Republic, Wired, and Vox, the two published many pieces criticizing the meat industry and promoting its alternatives. It’s not surprising, then, that Feed the People, even after defending the varied pleasures of industrial food, provides a critique of both industrial meat production and the bogus claims of regenerative ranching, and other smaller-scale, more “farm-to-table” approaches to animal rearing.
In Feed the People, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are explicit that everyone should eat far less meat. They advocate for increasing taxes on meat that would help internalize the external costs of its production, and they promote improved alternative meat sources that would serve as a replacement for industrially produced meats. While they suggest that a “eat less meat, stupid” policy proposal amounts to “meat austerity,” they equate eating meat to “other bad pleasures you may also be loath to lose—booze, risky sex, dangerous sports, gambling” (93). For example, their vision for a healthy, industrial food future would include Waffle House branches with “mycelium-based steak and Impossible burgers for the patty melts,” and no red meat thanks to “improvements to animal-welfare laws and the implementation of carbon taxes on agriculture” (229).
But, meat is simply too popular, and too ubiquitous to actually replace anytime soon with alternatives. While alternative proteins like plant-based and cell-cultured meat may eat into some meat consumption, there is little evidence that it can displace even a small portion of the animal agriculture industry. Unfortunately for its critics, industrial meat production is the only way to produce enough meat and dairy products without accelerating the deforestation of wild lands or driving up food prices. Intensive and confined operations have lower emissions, use less land, and have the potential to improve welfare at a better rate than their organic, regenerative, and extensive alternatives.
Replacing industrially-produced meat and dairy with non-industrially produced meat and dairy would significantly increase land use for agriculture, raise emissions, force the conversion of wild lands into pasture, and increase the price of food. This is not the reality that Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg want—they are especially critical of the regenerative gurus who promise to replace bad factory farms with pastures and grass-fed livestock operations.
Meating the Moment
And, perhaps more importantly, by criticizing meat production in total, Feed the People cedes the debate to the newly coalesced anti-industrial MAHA foodies. Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg essentially defend industrial food, except for the part of industrial food that is most central to the modern American plate.
For the vast majority of MAHA, meat and dairy products are central to nutrition and health. They advocate for beef tallow instead of seed oils, organ meats instead of vegetables, and ground beef and eggs instead of grains. With few exceptions, much of the cultural and political energy of the new anti-industrial food movement relies on the idea that animal products are vastly healthier than the fibers, sugars, and carbohydrates that purportedly drive inflammation, weight gain, mental disrepair, and all manner of physiological and psychological maladies.
Defending industrial agriculture means defending it against this movement, and convincing at least some of its constituents that industrial agriculture is not the problem. In 2026, that means acknowledging the carnivorous shift in American foodie identity, and attempting to channel that energy towards the most efficient forms of meat and dairy production. MAHA leaders like RFK Jr., Joel Salatin, and the like, may rage against health threats from factory farms, CAFOs, and large-scale dairies, but, for most, industrial animal agriculture is the only source of affordable meat and dairy. Centering a defense of industrial food around an overarching anti-meat politics simply is a non-starter for the vast majority of Americans, and lets the most radical anti-industrial fringe of MAHA control the debate over the future of American food and farming.
Some anti-meat activists and researchers seem to have tacitly understood this dilemma. For example, Coefficient Giving’s Lewis Bollard has, for years, advocated for marginal improvements to animal welfare standards in industrial agriculture. This approach may not save the millions of animals being born and bred to slaughter, but feasible steps to make their lives even just slightly better trump infeasible pathways to end factory farming. This was the central philosophy behind California’s 2018 passage of Proposition 12 to limit extreme confinement of hogs and chicken in gestation crates.
Since passing by referendum, Proposition 12 has been the target of failed lawsuits and campaigns, mainly from the meat industry. Most recently, this opposition took the form of the Save Our Bacon Act, which sought to ban states from imposing animal welfare laws onto meat producers. That bill died in Congress, but was given new life—to the consternation of many—when Republican legislators added the bill text to the pending Farm Bill.
Whether or not Proposition 12 survives the upcoming Senate Farm Bill vote, the effort to ban gestation crates and marginally improve the welfare of the horde of animals going through factory farms demonstrates both opportunities for and limitations to anti-meat politics. While many Americans—and, apparently, the majority of California’s voters in 2018—are appalled by aspects of industrial meat production, few Americans—around 4%, according to Pew—are actually morally opposed to the act of eating meat. If industrial meat is here to stay—whether through incremental steps like banning gestation, or more radical pathways—the only way to improve these modes of production is to embrace them. This would be drawing “democratic hedonism” to its logical conclusion. This is especially the case since both the contemporary supporters and detractors of the industrial food system seem to only agree on one thing: the importance and centrality of meat.
The Future of Industrial Food Will Include Meat
To be fair to Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg, the rise of MAHA in American food politics happened fast. And the process of writing a book is slow. But while much of Feed the People could not have been written with MAHA in mind, there was little doubt in 2023 or early 2024 that the lodestar of food politics would always be meat.
Feed the People was a project born out of the Pollan-era of anti-industrial food discourse. It speaks to progressive values and finds common ground over things like climate, corporate power, and labor. That posture made sense when the opposition to industrial agriculture was a coalition of progressives who could potentially be persuaded by appeals to “democratizing” pleasures and the reality of environmental impacts. But, it does not make sense today, when that opposition has mutated into a populist movement that has successfully captured state power, rejects basic premises of agricultural science, and wants to dismantle the food system to try to, among other reasons, increase testosterone production in teens.
Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg set out in Feed the People to defend the industrial food system from its progressive critics, and they do so with creativity and empiricism. But, they can not bring themselves to defend the part of the system—meat and dairy—upon which most Americans’ food preferences actually hinge. In doing so, they fall victim to the same kind of moralizing that is central to the critique of industrial agriculture. While the moral center of food politics has shifted from Chez Panisse to the Joe Rogan Experience, the underlying feeling has not changed: disgust at how most people eat.
A defense of industrial food requires a defense of industrial meat and dairy—not as a guilty pleasure to be taxed and surreptitiously abolished, but as one of the greatest achievements of modernity. Industrial animal agriculture feeds hundreds of millions of people affordably and can, with reforms and improvements, be made better still. That is a hard book to write, especially when the authors firmly believe the opposite.