Billie Eilish is doubling down on veganism as the industry teeters, celebrity vegans defect, and fine dining retreats from plants. Can she pull off what Joaquin Phoenix, Miley Cyrus, and the Impossible Burger couldn’t?
Billie Eilish has been vegan since she was twelve and for reasons that have not changed since she was twelve: she learned how animals are treated in the industrial food system, and she wanted no part of it. She is twenty-four now, which means she has been holding this position for more than half her life, long enough to have watched the movement she belongs to swell and contract and be declared dead several times, only to swell again, even if more quietly.
Last summer, she performed her Hit Me Hard and Soft show over six nights at London’s O2 Arena, and as a condition of those performances, she required that every food vendor in the building serve plant-based food; the vendors were told they would offer corn naan and peri-peri halloumi wraps or they would offer nothing, and so that is what they offered. She did the same at Co-op Live in Manchester and at the UBS Arena outside New York, where the menu included items named after her songs — the “Bad Guy” Dog, the “Birds of a Feather” Tenders and Fries — and at venues across Europe and the United States, until the touring footprint of her Hit Me Hard and Soft world tour had raised $13 million for climate organizations, donated 7.7 million plant-based meals, secured pledges from 36,000 fans to eat one plant-based meal a day for thirty days, and kept 135,200 single-use bottles from landfills, numbers that have the quality of a campaign rather than a concert.
“The most important thing you can do is changing what’s on your plate and what you’re eating,” she said at an event in Paris in 2023. “Trying to end animal agriculture and eating a more plant-based diet is really, really important.”
This past April, in a video interview with Elle magazine, Eilish was asked to name the hill she’d die on. “Y’all ain’t gonna like me for this one,” she said, and then: “eating meat is inherently wrong,” that loving animals and eating them cannot coexist, that you cannot do both. The backlash came quickly and had a familiar shape — the privilege accusations, the food-access arguments, the old photographs of leather that circulated as evidence of hypocrisy. She responded by posting graphic slaughterhouse footage to her Instagram Stories, footage she marked as sensitive content and then posted anyway, alongside a statement urging her followers to “pls continue to live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance and denial and try to convince urself that ur not living a lie.” She did not back down. “So stay fking mad at me. I really don’t give a goddamn fk.”
The year the world went vegan
Beyond Meat — a company based in El Segundo, California, that figured out how to make a hamburger patty from pea protein that bled beet juice and left a grease stain on a bun exactly the way a beef patty would — had by the spring of 2019 achieved the unusual distinction of producing the best initial public offering of the year; its shares opened at $46 on the first day of trading and closed near $66, and for a while it seemed like a company — and an industry — whose moment had finally arrived. Its chief competitor, Impossible Foods, had installed its meatless burger in every Burger King in the country. Supermarket sales of meat alternatives surged 19.2 percent to $878 million in the preceding year. Kim Kardashian appeared in advertisements for Beyond Meat while wearing a white lab coat — not, historically, her preferred uniform — in her capacity as the company’s chief taste consultant. Miley Cyrus, who had adopted a plant-based diet in 2014, had tattooed a pig on her arm and posted vegan recipes on a regular basis and talked about it in every interview willing to ask, and it seems fair to say that she meant it. The Economist declared 2019 “The Year of the Vegan.” At dinner parties in certain zip codes, asking for the fish had come to feel like a statement of values, and so had asking for the lamb, and neither in a flattering way.
Then, on February 9, 2020 — a date that can, in retrospect, be understood as somewhere near the outer limit of the movement’s cultural reach — Joaquin Phoenix walked to the podium at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, having just won Best Actor for Joker, a film in which he plays a man in white face paint descending methodically into violence, and used his acceptance speech to describe the experience of a dairy cow whose newborn calf has been taken away. “We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable,” he told the 3,300 people in the room, and the roughly 23 million watching at home. “And then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf, and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.” The dairy industry issued a formal written response. An Oscars’ acceptance speech had necessitated a formal written response from the dairy industry. Nothing about the plant-based era, before or since, was quite that peak.
The long goodbye
Seven months after Phoenix’s speech, in September 2020, Miley Cyrus appeared on Episode 1531 of the Joe Rogan Experience and explained, to the most widely listened-to podcaster in America, that she had started eating fish again. She had been doing it for about a year at that point — since 2019 — without mentioning it publicly. “I was vegan for a very long time,” she said, “and I’ve had to introduce fish and omegas into my life because my brain wasn’t functioning properly.” She said she felt “so much more sharper.” She mentioned that when her then-husband, Liam Hemsworth, first cooked fish on the grill for her, she had cried; she called the experience traumatic, then said she had gotten through it. Rogan nodded.
Singer Lizzo arrived at veganism in 2020, the same year Cyrus was quietly departing it, and eventually left it as well, drawn away by Japanese food — specifically fresh sushi and fluffy egg, which she described as revelatory. She said animal proteins helped with mental fog. She still considers the vegan diet the “healthiest way to eat”, she has said, and hopes to return to it someday. In the meantime, she eats fish.
Daniel Humm, the Swiss-born chef behind Eleven Madison Park — three Michelin stars, a tasting menu that costs several hundred dollars, and, for years, a honey-lavender-glazed duck that guests arranged their travel schedules around — made in 2021 what was probably the most consequential announcement of the entire plant-based era: when the restaurant reopened after the pandemic, it would serve no animal products; not the duck, not the lamb, not the caviar. Humm felt it was no longer possible to run a restaurant of Eleven Madison’s stature while serving meat without an explanation that had become too difficult to construct. In 2022, the restaurant became the first in the world to earn three Michelin stars for a plant-based menu. In October 2025, the duck came back. “After listening to guests’ feedback over five years,” the restaurant wrote, “it became clear that while we had built something meaningful, we had also unintentionally kept people out. This is the opposite of what we believe hospitality to be.” The duck has been booked solid.
The industry numbers moved in the same direction. Beyond Meat’s revenue in 2025 fell to $275.5 million — approaching the company’s 2019 levels, as if everything between had been an expensive digression — and, carrying more than $1.1 billion in debt, it was flagged by analysts as a Chapter 11 bankruptcy risk, surviving by restructuring its obligations through 2030 and counting on that being far enough away. Impossible Foods laid off more than 130 California workers in early 2025, following several earlier rounds of cuts. Sales of refrigerated meat alternatives fell about 21 percent in the year to June 2024. Hart House, Kevin Hart’s vegan fast-food chain, shut all four of its locations. NEAT Burger — backed by Lewis Hamilton and Leonardo DiCaprio —closed its U.K. locations after shuttering New York and Dubai. In Chicago, four vegan and vegetarian restaurants closed within eight days of each other in November. In Los Angeles, Flore Vegan in Silver Lake, which had opened in 2008 and occupied a particular position in the neighborhood’s self-image, closed after sixteen years. Moby sold his longstanding nearby A-lister vegan hot-spot Little Pine, which later shuttered and, later still, was to be taken over by Eilish and her family as another vegan restaurant, but remains empty to this day.
Running alongside all of this was a culture war that plant-based eating had, without quite intending to, walked into. Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and the man who calls himself Liver King had spent several years performing carnivory as a philosophical stance — not just a diet but an argument, with veganism as the emblem of everything they were arguing against. One analysis of social media content from 2022 to 2024 found that a tenth of all posts about meat and plant-based food carried an explicit culture-war dimension. And separately, the ultra-processed food backlash — the one that made consumers anxious about seed oils and oat-milk cheese and anything that seemed to have been assembled in a laboratory — had begun absorbing the very products that had made veganism most accessible; half of surveyed consumers said they were concerned that meat alternatives were too processed. The Impossible Burger, the Beyond Sausage — engineered to seem like something they were not — now seemed, to many people, like exactly that. Henry Mance, writing in the Financial Times, offered a verdict that has since been quoted at some length: “Meat-free advocates were relying on mass conversion … that isn’t happening.”
Stay mad at her
Eilish was not, at the O2 Arena or UBS Arena or Co-op Live, making an argument. She was arranging a situation. The vendors served her menu; the fans bought it, and what happened, by the available evidence, was that people ate it.
The Elle interview, by contrast, was an argument. When the backlash arrived —and it arrived in the way that celebrity dietary statements now always arrive, with accusations of privilege stacked on top of food-access arguments stacked on top of old photographs of leather — she did not moderate or clarify. She posted the slaughterhouse footage. She wrote: “Go watch a documentary or two and some footage of what is done to the animals u claim to love and what it does to the planet u pretend to love as well. if that footage was hard for u to watch i encourage u to pls take a look at urself,” she wrote.
What remains
Even as the plant-based food industry was contracting, the number of vegans in the United Kingdom rose by a million in 2023. The global plant-based food market was valued at $46.77 billion in 2024 and is projected to more than double by 2034. What has been failing is not broad interest in eating more plants, but the particular industrial bet — the engineered burger, the processed sausage, the meat substitute as a premium object — that animated the boom.
People are still eating less meat, still cooking lentils and roasting vegetables and ordering plant-based options at restaurants they wouldn’t have thought to ask about a decade ago; 61 percent of consumers now expect any restaurant, regardless of category, to have them. According to market research, 13.7 percent of Gen Zers actively follow vegetarian, vegan, or flexitarian diets — the highest rate in recorded history for any generation.
The movement has not gone away, even if it has gone quiet.
Eilish is trying to make it loud again, under conditions that are, objectively, not favorable: after the carnivore culture war, after the ultra-processed panic, after Miley on Rogan, after Lizzo and the sushi, after the duck came back to Eleven Madison Park. She seems to find none of this discouraging, which is either admirable or irrational, and the line between those two things is not always clear. “Like I am so tired of standing up for/having empathy for living beings being controversial,” she wrote on Instagram. It is, at minimum, a very precise description of a feeling she has been having since she was twelve. And now at twenty-four, with a concert documentary that just grossed $20 million in its first weekend, and, as her brother Finneas wrote in a note she reads aloud in the film, has everyone in the palm of her hand, she does not appear to have any plans to stop feeling that way anytime soon.
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