Butter Is Back, Beef Is Canceled, and Nobody Told the Steakhouse: Seventy Years of Foods We Were Definitely Done Eating

In the great ledger of American dietary prophecy, almost nothing has gone according to plan. Foods have been condemned, mourned, replaced with inferior substitutes, quietly rehabilitated, and then celebrated as ancient wisdom — sometimes within the same decade. If you have been paying attention to nutritional guidance since approximately 1955, you have been told to stop eating butter, start eating margarine, stop eating margarine, reduce red meat, embrace lean protein, fear carbohydrates, embrace whole grains, fear whole grains, drink skim milk, and question skim milk — and somewhere in there you were also supposed to find time to eat.

This is not an article about nutrition science, which is doing its best under genuinely difficult conditions. This is an article about the prophets of nutritional doom, who have been announcing the permanent American departure from various beloved foods for seventy years, and the foods, which have declined to leave.

The Great Fat Scare and the Margarine Decade

The modern era of food prophecy arguably begins with Ancel Keys, a physiologist who in the 1950s advanced the hypothesis that dietary fat — particularly saturated fat — was the primary driver of heart disease. His work was influential, contested, and ultimately transformed into public health policy in ways that went considerably further than his data probably warranted.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the message had simplified into something the American Heart Association could put on a pamphlet: fat is bad, saturated fat is very bad, and butter is practically a murder weapon. The food industry, which has never met a health panic it couldn't monetize, promptly introduced margarine as the virtuous alternative. Americans bought it. Literally.

Butter consumption fell. Margarine consumption rose. Nutritional futurists declared that butter was a relic of a less enlightened era, destined for the same cultural dustbin as lead paint and cigarette ads on television.

Then, in the 1990s, researchers began looking more carefully at trans fats — the partially hydrogenated oils that gave margarine its spreadable consistency and its shelf life. What they found was not good. By the 2000s, trans fats had been linked to cardiovascular disease in terms that made the original butter warnings look quaint. The FDA eventually moved to eliminate them from the food supply.

Butter, rehabilitated, returned. It did not return quietly. It returned on charcuterie boards, in high-end restaurant sauces, and as the cornerstone of the "bulletproof coffee" movement, in which people began adding butter to their morning coffee as a wellness practice. The prophecy had not merely failed — it had inverted.

Red Meat's Forty-Year Funeral That Never Ended

If butter's story is one of condemnation and comeback, red meat's story is one of a funeral that has been scheduled and rescheduled so many times that the caterers have given up waiting.

By the 1980s, the case against red meat had become a staple of American health journalism. Saturated fat. Cholesterol. Colon cancer. The American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association were both recommending significant reductions. Chicken consumption rose. "White meat" became a phrase that carried genuine moral weight at dinner tables across the country.

The beef industry did not collapse. American per-capita beef consumption declined somewhat from its 1970s peak, but the steakhouse did not become a museum exhibit. Instead, it became, by the 2010s, something of a cultural institution — premium cuts, dry-aged programs, $65 ribeyes served to people who had, many of them, also recently read an article about how red meat was killing them. The cognitive dissonance was apparently manageable.

The paleo diet and, later, the carnivore diet turned the original prophecy completely on its head, with adherents arguing that red meat was not merely acceptable but optimal, and that the last forty years of dietary guidance had been the real health hazard. Whether they were right is a question for scientists. What is not in question is that the predicted disappearance of red meat from American tables has not occurred.

The Carbohydrate Wars (A Conflict With No Clear Victor)

The 1990s introduced a new villain: carbohydrates. Or rather, it reintroduced them — Robert Atkins had been arguing against carbohydrates since the early 1970s, mostly to polite skepticism from the mainstream nutrition establishment. But by the late 1990s, with obesity rates rising and the low-fat dietary experiment showing complicated results, the carbohydrate hypothesis got a second hearing.

The Atkins Diet became a phenomenon. Bread consumption was supposed to crater. Pasta was going to become a niche product. Pizza was — well, nobody really thought pizza was going to disappear, but it was at least supposed to be eaten with guilt.

The bread aisle did not close. American pasta consumption proved resilient. What actually happened is that "low-carb" and "gluten-free" became enormous product categories, generating billions of dollars in revenue — much of it from products that replaced wheat flour with other starches and sugars in ways that nutritionists found only marginally less alarming than the original. The food industry had once again found a way to sell Americans a health-adjacent product at a premium price. The prophecy had not eliminated bread; it had created a more expensive bread.

The Pattern in the Pantry

Look across seventy years of food prophecy and a pattern emerges with almost comic clarity. A food is identified as dangerous. Consumption shifts somewhat. An industry emerges to provide the replacement. The replacement turns out to have its own problems. The original food is quietly reconsidered. A new food is identified as dangerous.

Sugar was going to be eliminated by artificial sweeteners. Artificial sweeteners generated their own health concerns and a separate generation of prophecies. Eggs were going to be limited to three per week. Then the cholesterol guidance was revised. Then eggs were fine. Then some eggs were fine. The American breakfast plate has been in regulatory limbo for forty years.

What the prophets consistently underestimated was the combination of human attachment to food, the food industry's adaptability, and the genuine complexity of nutrition science, which keeps discovering that the body is more complicated than the previous study assumed.

Butter is on restaurant menus with its own origin story. Steak is a status symbol. Bread has a sourdough era. And somewhere, right now, a wellness influencer is explaining that the food you ate for lunch is slowly destroying you — and has a supplement that will help.

The obituaries are already written. The foods are already making reservations for next Friday.