Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was ridiculed en masse Monday night after recommending Americans consider alternatives to beef amid an extraordinary spike in ground beef prices.“If [beef] is too expensive, unlike fuel, you can eat chicken, pork, salmon, eggs… there are other sources of really g...

Rollins’ claim that prices for other protein sources were “coming down” is inaccurate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of eggs, while lower than in 2025, has increased in recent months, increasing by 4.3% from May to June, falling by 0.5% from June to July, and then increasing again by 2.9% from July to August. Pork and chicken costs both increased by 0.4% from July to August.

Meanwhile, prices for ground beef hit a new record after reaching an average price of around $7.16 per pound as of August, an increase of 0.6% from July and 7.9% when compared with the previous year.

“If Joe Biden said anything close to this, MAGA would’ve had a total meltdown,” argued Democratic influencer Harry Sisson in a social media post on X to his more than 400,000 followers. “Now this is just part of Trump’s messaging. Hypocrisy at its finest.”

Others, like the progressive media organization MeidasTouch, jokingly argued that Rollins was “about two weeks away from telling people they can always eat bugs.”

“You will eat the bugs, you will live in the pod,” quipped Damin Toell, a New York-based attorney, in a social media post on X.

A multi-millionaire telling people to eat other protein that they also cannot afford is about as close to a “let them eat cake” moment as we’ll probably get.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      20 hours ago

      It’s weird when I see articles like this

      Bugs Were Supposed to be the Future of Food. Now, the Industry is Collapsing.

      https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/03/bugs-insect-farming-industry-startups-collapsing-meat-protein-substitutes-livestock/

      Dutch entomologist Marcel Dicke pitched eating bugs in his 2010 TED talk as critical to sustainably feeding a growing human population, because insects have a much smaller carbon footprint than beef, pork, and chicken.

      It seems like we are missing the obvious. People would really rather eat bugs rather than…simply cut down on meat? As weird as I sometimes find omnivores rationalizing some of their behaviors, that strikes me as a really wild turn, but…shrug?

      Something tells me that eating things like rice and beans would be a helluva lot more sustainable than trying to scale up insect production for human consumption.

      But things turn extremely irrational over food, I’ve found, and so when I saw the conspiracy theorists losing their fucking minds over eating bugs, it definitely tracks. This dumb conspiracy theory sometimes surfaces in the everyday - a few omnivores have told me (when they learn I’m vegetarian) that the don’t want to eat the bugs.

      I did not and still don’t know how these two issues are in any way related other than that reactionary omnivores have this innate “you cannot tell ME what to do!” attitude about what they are eating whenever they are talking to a vegan or vegetarian and it often surfaces in really strange ways: they will tell you how much they don’t like salad (I don’t eat salad hardly at all) or tofu (tofu is not required for vegetarian or vegan diet), that they hate all vegetables and eat mostly meat (that’s a bad place to be for a lot of reasons, no matter who you are) that “carbs”, aka, vegetables or fruit are “bad for you” (what the actual fuck?) or sometimes, “they won’t eat bugs”. Not sure why they think vegans or vegetarians would have the least bit of interest in eating insects, but…