#Yes2Meat: Inside the Meat Industry’s Digital Counter-Strike
When the EAT-Lancet Commission launched its “planetary health diet” in 2019, it was never just a nutrition study. It was a mirror held up to the world’s most destructive industries, and they didn’t like what they saw. The report called for doubling our consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts while cutting red meat and sugar by more than half. In short: eat more plants, fewer animals.
For scientists, this was common sense. For the meat industry, it was an existential threat. What followed wasn’t a debate, it was a disinformation campaign so calculated and coordinated that it now stands as a textbook case in how powerful industries manipulate public opinion to protect profit.
The birth of a “culture war”
Within days of the report’s release, the hashtag #Yes2Meat appeared on Twitter. At first glance, it looked like a spontaneous grassroots reaction, farmers, doctors, and self-styled “carnivore influencers” uniting to defend meat from “elitist vegans”. But leaked documents later revealed it was anything but spontaneous.
According to the Changing Markets Foundation’s 2025 report, the hashtag was launched on 14 January 2019, three days before EAT-Lancet went public. It was coordinated by a small group of familiar names: UC Davis scientist Frank Mitloehner, Belgian academic Frédéric Leroy, keto author Nina Teicholz, and self-proclaimed carnivore doctor Shawn Baker. They didn’t just share opinions, they shared a strategy.
The campaign’s real purpose wasn’t to challenge the data but to frame the entire report as an ideological attack on culture and freedom. It was the moment dietary science was dragged into the trenches of a global culture war, and meat became a political identity.
Manufacturing outrage
The Changing Markets analysis mapped over 37 months of Twitter data and identified a “tightly coordinated network” of 100 mis-influencers responsible for more than 90 percent of engagement in the backlash. The top 20 alone generated nearly 70 percent. None were bots. They were real people, doctors, journalists, academics, each profiting, directly or indirectly, from promoting high-meat diets.
The same accounts repeatedly tagged one another, reposted identical messages, and amplified content from within the group to simulate public consensus. Over 60 percent of the links they shared came from their own circle. It was a digital echo chamber designed to look organic.
Industry hashtags like #ClimateFoodFacts and #Yes2Meat served as rallying points. #ClimateFoodFacts was orchestrated by the PR agency Red Flag, which was hired, likely by the Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA), to pre-emptively discredit the report. Leaked internal slides show Red Flag briefing “experts” in advance and celebrating its “remarkable success.” Posts were rolled out simultaneously by multiple industry-aligned accounts, flooding timelines before EAT-Lancet even launched.
Within weeks, the narrative was everywhere: the diet was “radical,” “elitist,” “anti-science.” Ordinary people were told global elites wanted to take away their steak.
The illusion of scientific independence
Among the leading mis-influencers were scientists and academics who presented themselves as independent thinkers. In reality, many were bankrolled by the very industry they defended.
Frank Mitloehner, founder of the Clarity and Leadership for Environmental Awareness and Research (CLEAR) Center at UC Davis, received at least $3.8 million from livestock industry sources between 2018 and 2023, including Burger King, the National Pork Board, and the California Cattle Council. Leaked correspondence shows that Mitloehner “launched an academic opposition of 40 scientists… coinciding with the official opposition named #Yes2Meat.” The “remarkable success” of that campaign later became a fundraising pitch for further industry support.
Frédéric Leroy, who ranked as the most central figure in the mis-influencer network, played a similar role in Europe. He used his platform to undermine the EAT-Lancet findings, arguing that meat was “essential” to human health and culture. He went on to found ALEPH2020, a website positioning itself as an “ethical” livestock think tank while publishing anti-EAT-Lancet articles and hosting the infamous Dublin Declaration, a 2022 document framing meat consumption as a social good and branding plant-based advocacy as “ideological.”
This is how “independent science” is manufactured: fund a handful of academics, give them PR support, and frame them as mavericks standing up to orthodoxy. It’s the tobacco playbook reheated.
Turning misinformation into identity
By January 2019, #Yes2Meat had reached 26 million people, slightly more than those engaging with the EAT-Lancet report itself. Critical posts were shared six times more often than supportive ones. The campaign’s messaging combined two powerful ingredients: personal anecdotes (“Meat healed me”) and populist resentment (“They’re coming for your Sunday roast”).
It didn’t matter that the EAT-Lancet diet wasn’t a vegan campaign, or that it allowed small amounts of meat and dairy. The goal was to reframe the conversation entirely, from science to identity, from evidence to emotion.
The backlash had real-world consequences. Under political pressure echoing online narratives, the World Health Organization withdrew its sponsorship from a planned EAT-Lancet launch event in March 2019. Researchers faced harassment and smear campaigns. Some reported long-term mental-health impacts. The industry had found a new form of power: not just lobbying behind closed doors, but shaping public perception in real time.
The digital machinery of denial
The Changing Markets investigation exposes how the same players kept evolving their strategy. The Animal Agriculture Alliance, the Meat Institute, and think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) all pushed synchronised talking points: that livestock emissions are overstated, that dietary change is cultural imperialism, that “real science” supports meat.
On 17 January 2019, the day of EAT-Lancet’s launch, six industry executives posted identical tweets within two hours, using both #Yes2Meat and #ClimateFoodFacts. Two weeks later, they repeated the stunt. These weren’t coincidences. They were coordinated flood tactics, the social-media equivalent of astroturfing a protest.
The IEA framed EAT-Lancet as a “war on freedom,” releasing videos of its economist Christopher Snowdon mockingly weighing out seven grams of bacon to dramatise the diet’s supposed austerity. British tabloids gleefully joined in. “Experts want to ban bacon,” they cried, a convenient diversion from the report’s actual warning: that industrial animal agriculture is driving climate collapse and chronic disease.
Red Flag’s fingerprints
Red Flag’s involvement ties the meat industry’s disinformation efforts to a much wider ecosystem of corporate lobbying. The Dublin-based firm’s client list includes not just livestock trade groups but tobacco, chemical, and fossil-fuel companies, all veterans of denial and delay.
Its leaked report boasted that “key stories returned time and again in traditional and social media,” successfully portraying EAT-Lancet as radical and hypocritical. Paid ads reached nearly 780,000 people, while affiliated campaigns like the Meat Institute’s MeatPoultryNutrition.org provided slick “resources” attacking the study.
In essence, the industry didn’t just respond to criticism, it built an infrastructure for permanent resistance.
From Dublin to Denver
After the initial backlash succeeded in muddying public understanding, the industry shifted from reaction to consolidation. It began hosting conferences masquerading as scientific summits.
In 2022, the International Summit on the Societal Role of Meat produced the Dublin Declaration, drafted by Leroy and his network, claiming that livestock are “indispensable” for human wellbeing. In 2024, the follow-up Denver Summit issued a “Call for Action,” framed as urgent scientific dialogue but functioning as a PR workshop to “maintain the social licence of the meat industry.”
Audio recordings obtained by Changing Markets show organisers explicitly discussing how to “plan an urgent communications drive.” This was not science, it was strategy.
A more hostile landscape
By the time EAT-Lancet 2.0 launched in October 2025, the online terrain had changed dramatically. Social-media moderation had weakened. Misinformation spread freely under the banner of “free speech.” Generative AI could produce endless fake experts and hyper-targeted ads. And the “manosphere”, a network of hyper-masculine influencers like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, had turned steak into a symbol of manhood.
What began as an industry-led smear campaign in 2019 had merged into a broader ideological movement. Rejecting plant-based eating became shorthand for rejecting climate science, feminism, and collective responsibility itself. The backlash wasn’t about food anymore, it was about identity, control, and profit.
The cost of denial
The consequences of this manufactured outrage are profound. While the science becomes clearer, that animal agriculture is a leading driver of greenhouse-gas emissions, deforestation, and disease, public understanding is deliberately clouded. The industry’s false equivalence between “choice” and “freedom” has delayed the policies that could save lives and ecosystems.
A 2024 survey of climate experts found that livestock emissions must be cut by half by 2030 to meet the Paris Agreement. Yet governments continue to subsidise meat and dairy as if the atmosphere will adapt.
This is not accidental. Disinformation is a business model. Casting doubt on established science protects billions in profit. The same tactics once used to sell cigarettes are now used to sell bacon. The names have changed, but the playbook hasn’t.
The bigger picture
The EAT-Lancet backlash offers a lesson in how power adapts. When evidence threatens profit, industries don’t argue with the data, they attack the credibility of those presenting it. They blur lines between expertise and influence, between personal opinion and propaganda. They manufacture “grassroots” outrage to make destruction look democratic.
The industry doesn’t need to win the argument, only to keep it going long enough for regulation to stall. Every viral tweet mocking plant-based eating buys them another year of profit. Every journalist who frames dietary reform as a “culture war” hands them free advertising.
Where responsibility lies
The fight for a sustainable food system isn’t only about consumer choice; it’s about intellectual honesty. Scientists, journalists, and policymakers have a duty to expose who is funding whom. Media outlets must stop treating corporate-funded contrarians as independent voices. Social-media platforms must treat disinformation about food systems with the same seriousness as vaccine or election lies.
Because this isn’t just a communication problem, it’s a planetary emergency. The longer industries succeed in confusing the public, the more irreversible the damage becomes.
The lesson of EAT-Lancet
The EAT-Lancet Commission tried to answer a simple question: how can we feed ten billion people without destroying the planet? The answer, eat fewer animals, more plants, was never radical. What’s radical is the scale of deception required to silence it.
The backlash to EAT-Lancet wasn’t the public rejecting science; it was an industry rejecting accountability. And as EAT-Lancet 2.0 faces the same machinery of denial, one truth remains unchanged: no PR campaign, no hashtag, and no “independent” scientist can alter the fact that our future depends on liberation, for the planet, and for every animal still treated as a product in it.