The Steakhouse Is Our Wildest Delusion

What separates steakhouse nostalgia from a carnivore diet? The former is about going back to the “good old days,” when a two-martini lunch would be feasible and acceptable. It suggests a desire for glamour, for ease, for legible menu items that don’t challenge one’s palate or shift one’s perspective. A carnivore diet is about going back to the stone age (despite cows as we now know them not being present during that epoch). It’s understood to be, by mainstream culture, a diet akin to raw veganism in its dogmatic and narrow approach to what it means to eat healthily. Both put beef at the center, cementing their ideologies as not just of nostalgia, but of delusion. 

But we can’t delude our way out of climate change and the effects of using land to feed large amounts of cattle on greenhouse gas emissions — though some people are certainly trying.