Has the vegan business bubble burst?
It's Been a Minute
NPR
4.7 • 9.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There was a time when veganism – or plant-based food – seemed to be in ascendency: from the early 2010s when Beyoncé adopted a plant-based diet to its height in 2020, when the retail market for plant-based meat made over a billion dollars in sales. And then… things started getting a little more… meaty. From protein-maxxing to the new food pyramid, the culture seems to have shifted. But what does the plant-based food flop era say about our culture, how we think about our food, and how we feel about our future? Special guest host Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR political correspondent, discusses with writer Rachel Sugar, who wrote a piece on the boom and bust of veganism for New York Magazine, and Mark Bittman, long-time food journalist and former New York Times columnist who has written about veganism since the early 2010s.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This message comes from There's More to That, a podcast from the Smithsonian magazine. |
| 0:05.2 | With an insatiable curiosity, host Ari Daniels covers history, science, and culture. |
| 0:10.6 | Subscribe to There's More to That and find out how much more there is to almost everything. |
| 0:19.1 | Okay, so here's a question for you. |
| 0:22.1 | Is veganism losing its luster? |
| 0:25.2 | Being a vegan or becoming a vegan or going vegan was an aspiration for people for a long |
| 0:31.2 | time, but it's hard. |
| 0:33.0 | And every vegan, well, almost every vegan will tell you that it's hard. |
| 0:37.7 | There's a sort of nihilistic strain of like everything sucks, this sort of party at the end |
| 0:44.0 | of the world vibe. And there's certainly been trend pieces. Looking at tanning beds are back, |
| 0:50.3 | smoking has social cachet again. There have been some articles about fur being back on runways. |
| 0:55.0 | This kind of sense of like, I'm going to enjoy what I have left. |
| 1:00.0 | I think sort of like cheekily depressing. |
| 1:04.0 | And, you know, that's bad. |
| 1:06.0 | Like, I think veganism, I think it requires optimism. |
| 1:09.0 | Vegan or not, what you're eating says a lot about your values and your politics. |
| 1:14.2 | And it seems like that's shaping the restaurant business. |
| 1:17.2 | Or is it? |
| 1:21.5 | I know, I know you might have been expecting to hear Brittany. |
| 1:24.7 | She's out today, so I'm stepping in. |
| 1:26.8 | A few things to know about me. My name is |
| 1:28.5 | Danielle Kurtzleben. I'm a White House correspondent at NPR, and I eat meat. In fact, I grew up on a |
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