Turns Out Meat Is Still the Ultimate Luxury

The Atlantic

a day ago

A few years ago, during the coronavirus pandemic, Daniel Humm had an epiphany. Human reliance on animal products was cooking the planet, and, as a chef, reducing his reliance on them could be part of a solution. When his New York City restaurant, Eleven Madison Park—which had once been named the world's best restaurant —reopened, it would be free of animal products, making it the first three-Michelin-star dining room to bear that distinction.
Humm seemed reinvigorated by the change, and very, very eager to talk about it. 'From a creative place,' he told his friend Gabriela Hearst in Interview magazine at the time, 'the world does not need another dry-aged ribeye or butter-poached lobster.' He went on The Tonight Show and Morning Joe; he released an illustrated journal featuring observations such as 'our cooking should not conform to society,' as well as his own hand-drawn portraits of lentils, broccoli, and a popsicle, rendered in a rustic, neo-Expressionist-by-way-of-nursery-school style. He talked about going plant-based as both an ethical and an artistic imperative. 'It became very clear to me that our idea of what luxury is had to change,' Humm said at the time. 'We couldn't go back to doing what we did before.' He would make a small but decisive correction to a food system that was 'simply not sustainable.'
Four years later, vegan luxury dining is apparently the thing that wasn't sustainable. Yesterday, Humm announced that, after creating 'a new culinary language,' building 'something meaningful,' and igniting 'a debate that transcended food,' he will go back to speaking his previous culinary language. Eleven Madison Park will continue to offer a plant-based menu, but will also serve 'select animal products for certain dishes.' These select animal products, he said, will include 'fish' and 'meat.' And 'honey-lavender-glazed duck.' And oysters, and lobster. Also, chicken, maybe.
In an interview with The New York Times, Humm said he was moved to return animals to the menu for reasons of inclusion. 'I very much believed in the all-in approach, but I didn't realize that we would exclude people,' he said. 'I have some anxiety that people are going to say, 'Oh, he's a hypocrite,' but I know that the best way to continue to champion plant-based cooking is to let everyone participate around the table.' Elsewhere in the piece, he was somewhat more direct: Diners had become less interested in what Humm was offering. Sales of wine—which tends to come with a heavy markup and is thus a highly important part of many restaurants' business—were down, because people seemed to be less inclined to uncork a $1,500 bottle of Côte-Rôtie when a big bloody steak wasn't also involved. Bookings for EMP's private events were also flagging, Humm said: 'It's hard to get 30 people for a corporate dinner to come to a plant-based restaurant.'
Well, yeah. The thing is, people really, really like meat. All the time, but especially when they're paying up to $365 a head for dinner before tax, tip, and beverages. Between 2014 and 2024, annual per capita meat consumption rose—even as various publications heralded the end of beef, even as the consequences of climate change became even more unignorable, even before the secretary of health started telling people to eat tallow. Sales of plant-based meat have been declining since 2021, according to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit devoted to alternative proteins. In June, the CEO of Impossible Foods, which sells high-tech meat substitutes, told The Wall Street Journal that his company was considering taking an approach similar to Humm's, developing a half-beef burger. Though plenty of animal-free restaurants seem to be doing perfectly well, in fine dining they may be the exception rather than the rule. Of the United States' 263 Michelin-starred restaurants, just four are exclusively vegetarian or vegan. Americans just cannot seem to quit meat, no matter how good the alternative tastes.
But then again, part of Humm's problem might have been that his alternative didn't taste very good. When Pete Wells, then the New York Times ' restaurant critic, went to EMP in 2021, he found food that he described as 'acrid' and 'distorted,' including an extraordinarily fussy-sounding beet dish that 'tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint.' The people who are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for food tend to pay attention to reviews, and they tend to want to feel like they're getting what they've paid for. What happens in fine-dining restaurants does, eventually, trickle down to the rest of the food industry, but the problem with appointing yourself as an agent for the revolution is that then you really need people to buy what you are selling. And you can only be one of the world's most influential restaurants if you are making enough money to stay open.
The idea of a place such as Eleven Madison Park being on the vanguard of social change was funny even before it was revealed to be temporary. A nice meal is fundamentally a luxury good—one where no expense is spared, customers are always comfortable, the linens get washed every day, and the appeal is a sense of perfection. It is the opposite of sacrifice, which is what responding to climate change will require from all of us. Humm is right, of course—meat really is unsustainable. So is hubris.