The problem is that people in the US (and really most of the western world) have grown up eating meat, been told that they should desire meat, that meat is an essential part of their diet and, to a certain extent, that not eating meat is unmanly and weak.

Meat consumption is so ingrained that any attempt to curtail it is met with fierce opposition, because people feel as if it's an attack on their identity.

I don’t think that’s the case. Look around the world and you’ll see that as a country has become more prosperous that their meat consumption has increased. I don’t think it’s because people suddenly became more “manly”. It’s because of a simple fact: most humans love meat.

Food is more than a personal identity. It’s a major part of people’s culture globally and meat plays a primary role in many cultures. I think most people would eat more meat if they had the means to.

Only about 3.5% of Americans are vegetarian. Designing policy that favors this group would be ridiculous. Subsidizing meat and democratizing access to it is good policy since nearly everyone benefits from it.

Saying that I hope “plant meat” continues to improve and finds a market outside the novelty it mainly is today. But this can’t be forced on people.

>"Look around the world and you’ll see that as a country has become more prosperous that their meat consumption has increased. I don’t think it’s because people suddenly became more “manly”. It’s because of a simple fact: most humans love meat."

I think it's much more likely that people in countries with rising prosperity are seeing the high meat consumption in affluent parts of the world, and now that they themselves are becoming affluent, they want that diet/lifestyle themselves. It's aspirational, more than anything else.

There is certainly a biological appeal of eating cooked meat, just as there is with fatty (and sugary) foods in general: It signifies high caloric density, which is hugely important for a hunter/gatherer/subsistence community. That base desire is still there, leading to overeating and health issues, since excess calories are often abundant and easily affordable.

Modern Americans (and Europeans) eat a lot more meat than any other culture[1] past or present. The eating of meat every single day at every meal is a huge historical aberration and the clearest possible proof of our destructive overconsumption.

Just as with many other things like candy, sugary drinks, tobacco and alcohol, it would be wise to reduce consumption significantly. Rather than simply indulging base desires, we can choose to cut back and introduce some moderation, a wiser and more enlightened choice, not least because lifestock farming is an ongoing massive environmental disaster.

Currently the US is heavily subsidizing the meat industry, including by massively subsidizing corn. The wise move would be to cut that back and subsidize environmentally sound farming practices and ending the practice of feeding human food to animals. Farm what animals can be sustainably farmed on grass, hay and other plants unfit for human consumption, use the corn and soy and grains for food directly.

We in the western world have to realize that our wildly luxurious eating habits are completely unsustainable, and accept that meat will again be a once a week, maybe twice a week treat.

[1] Save a rare few very specific outliers, such as the Inuit, who in some areas subsist almost entirely on meat.