Why food tribalism — vegan vs. carnivore, keto vs. plant-based — is missing the point
The war about what to eat is making everyone eat worse.
Pick a side.
This is what the modern food landscape demands of anyone who pays attention to what they eat. Not just a preference, not just a general orientation, but a side — a tribe, a framework, a set of beliefs about food that comes with its own vocabulary, its own heroes and villains, its own account of what human beings are supposed to eat and why everything else is wrong.
The sides have names. Vegan. Carnivore. Keto. Plant-based. Paleo. Whole food. Raw. Low-carb. High-protein. Each has its own community, its own content ecosystem, its own roster of advocates who are absolutely certain that their approach is the correct one and that the people on the other side are, at best, misguided and, at worst, causing serious harm to themselves and others.
The wars between these tribes are conducted with an intensity that is genuinely remarkable given the subject matter. Food tribalism produces arguments, estrangements, and online conflicts of a ferocity that most important political debates do not generate. People lose friends over it. Families are divided by it. Strangers become enemies over the question of whether butter is good for you.
This is food tribalism. And it is, in almost every way that matters, missing the point entirely.
What the tribes have in common
The most striking thing about food tribes — and the thing that gets lost in the heat of their conflicts with each other — is how much they share.
Every major dietary tribe, regardless of what it advocates eating, shares several core beliefs. That food matters significantly for health. That most people are eating in ways that are suboptimal for their wellbeing. That the mainstream food system is failing people in important ways. That paying attention to what you eat is worthwhile and that most people do not pay enough attention. That there is a better way of eating, and that finding and following it will produce meaningful improvements in health and quality of life.
These are not trivial shared beliefs. They are, in fact, the most important things anyone has to say about food. And the tribes that hold them spend the overwhelming majority of their energy fighting each other over the details — over whether optimal eating includes animal products, over the role of carbohydrates, over the relative importance of different macronutrients — rather than advancing the shared project of helping people eat better.
The argument about whether the optimal human diet includes meat is genuinely interesting and genuinely unresolved. But it is an argument happening at the margins of what actually matters. The overwhelming majority of the health gains available from dietary change come not from resolving these marginal debates but from the things all the tribes agree on: eat more whole foods, eat more vegetables, eat less ultra-processed food, cook more of your own meals. These are not controversial claims. They are not disputed by any serious nutritional researcher, regardless of their tribal affiliation. And they are the changes that would produce the most significant health improvements for the most people.
The tribes are fighting over the ten percent while ignoring the ninety. And while they fight, the ninety percent goes unaddressed.
How tribalism distorts nutrition
Food tribalism does not just distract from what matters. It actively distorts the way people think about and engage with nutrition, in several specific ways.
It makes evidence tribal. In a healthy epistemic environment, evidence updates beliefs. You held a position, new evidence emerged, the position changed. This is how science is supposed to work. In a tribal environment, evidence is sorted by which tribe it supports rather than what it actually shows. Studies that support the tribe’s position are shared widely and cited as definitive. Studies that challenge the tribe’s position are dismissed — as industry-funded, as methodologically flawed, as politically motivated — regardless of their actual quality. The result is that tribal food communities become increasingly resistant to the evidence that would most improve their thinking, because that evidence is experienced as an attack rather than as information.
It attracts extreme personalities and positions. Every tribe has moderates who hold its core positions thoughtfully and with appropriate uncertainty. And every tribe has extremists who hold the most rigid version of its positions with absolute certainty and express those positions with maximum aggression. Social media dynamics systematically amplify the extremists — their content is more emotionally engaging, more shareable, more likely to generate the conflict that drives engagement — which means that the public face of any food tribe tends to be its most extreme and least nuanced members. The reasonable vegan gets fewer followers than the vegan who is publicly outraged about meat-eaters. The thoughtful keto advocate gets fewer views than the keto advocate who claims that plant foods are poisoning you. The extremists set the tone, and the tone is not conducive to learning.
It creates identity lock-in that prevents adjustment. When your diet is part of your tribal identity, changing it becomes an act of apostasy rather than a rational response to new information or changed circumstances. The person who has built a public identity around veganism cannot quietly start eating fish when their body seems to be asking for it, because doing so is not just a dietary change — it is a betrayal of the tribe and a public admission that the tribe’s position was not entirely correct. The identity lock-in means that people continue eating in ways that no longer serve them rather than make the adjustment that would improve their health, because the social cost of the adjustment is higher than the physical cost of the suboptimal diet.
It makes people worse at eating in the real world. Food tribes thrive in ideal conditions — when you have full control over what you eat, when you can shop specifically for your dietary approach, when you are surrounded by people who eat the same way. Real life is not ideal conditions. Real life involves eating at other people’s houses, traveling to places where the tribal food is not available, navigating social situations where the tribal rules create friction. Tribal eating approaches are brittle in ways that flexible, principle-based eating is not. They break under the pressure of normal life and require constant maintenance and negotiation that takes more energy than most people have available.
The question the tribes are not asking
The tribal wars about what to eat are conducted almost entirely without reference to the question that actually matters most in determining whether someone will eat well over the long term: will they actually do it?
It does not matter whether a particular dietary approach is theoretically optimal if the person following it cannot sustain it in their actual life. A diet that produces excellent health outcomes in clinical conditions and that falls apart within six months in real life is less valuable, practically, than a less theoretically perfect approach that someone can actually maintain.
This is the question that food tribes almost never ask, because it is a question that does not have a tribal answer. The answer depends on the individual — on their cooking skills, their schedule, their budget, their social environment, their relationship with food, their history with eating, their particular body and its particular needs. These things vary enormously between people, which is why the same dietary approach produces dramatically different results in different individuals, and why the tribal certainty that one approach is correct for everyone is almost always wrong.
The question is not which tribe is right. The question is what actually works for you — sustainably, pleasurably, in the context of your real life with its real constraints and real pleasures. That question is not answerable by joining a tribe. It is answerable only by paying attention, over time, to your own experience.
What the research actually shows
The nutritional science on what constitutes an optimal human diet is, in fact, considerably less tribal than the tribalists would have you believe.
There is genuine uncertainty and genuine ongoing debate in nutritional science. This is not a failure of the science — it reflects the genuine complexity of studying the effects of diet on human health, which involves enormous individual variation, the impossibility of controlled experiments on lifetime dietary patterns, the difficulty of distinguishing correlation from causation in epidemiological data, and a funding environment that has been historically distorted by industry interests.
Within that genuine uncertainty, there are some things that are not particularly contested. Dietary patterns that include abundant vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and varied protein sources are associated with better health outcomes across a wide range of populations. Ultra-processed food, consumed in large quantities, is associated with worse health outcomes. These findings hold across populations that eat very differently in other respects — populations that include significant animal products and populations that include very few, populations with high carbohydrate intake and populations with lower carbohydrate intake.
The tribal debates — whether animal products are good or bad, whether carbohydrates are the primary driver of metabolic disease, whether saturated fat is dangerous or beneficial — are happening at the margins of these findings, in territory where the evidence is genuinely mixed and where individual variation is significant. They are not unimportant debates. But they are not the most important debates in nutrition, and the energy devoted to them comes at the cost of the simpler and more actionable findings that the tribes actually agree on.
A different kind of eating
The alternative to food tribalism is not indifference to what you eat. It is eating with principles rather than rules, with flexibility rather than rigidity, with attention to your own experience rather than loyalty to a tribe’s doctrine.
It means eating more vegetables because vegetables are genuinely good for you, without having a tribal position on whether they should be the only thing you eat. It means eating less ultra-processed food because ultra-processed food is genuinely worse for you, without having a tribal position on whether any processed food is acceptable. It means cooking more of your own meals because cooking your own meals gives you control over what you eat and tends to produce better outcomes, without having a tribal position on what those meals must consist of.
It means being curious about food rather than certain about it. Reading about nutrition without treating any source as infallible. Trying things and noticing what happens in your body. Adjusting based on experience rather than doctrine. Maintaining the epistemic humility that any honest engagement with the complexity of nutritional science requires.
It means eating with other people across dietary differences — being someone who can share a table with vegans and carnivores and keto advocates and people who have never thought about their diet at all, and find the meal genuinely enjoyable regardless of what is on everyone’s plate.
This kind of eating is less visible than tribal eating. It does not generate content or community or the particular comfort of belonging to a group that knows it is right. It is also more sustainable, more pleasurable, more compatible with real life, and more likely to produce the actual health outcomes that everyone, regardless of tribe, is ultimately trying to achieve.
Where Joyvela stands on the tribal wars
We do not have a tribe. We are not vegan or carnivore or keto or paleo or any other dietary label that would align us with one side of the ongoing wars.
What we have is a set of principles — eat more whole foods, cook more, eat with pleasure, be flexible, pay attention to how food makes you feel — that are broadly compatible with many different specific dietary approaches and broadly incompatible with the rigidity and identity investment that tribal eating requires.
We publish recipes that include meat and recipes that do not. We write about vegetables with enthusiasm and about animal protein without apology. We do not have a position on whether butter is good for you, because the honest answer is that the evidence is mixed and individual responses vary and the question is less important than whether you are eating enough vegetables.
The war about what to eat is making everyone eat worse. We are trying, in a small and weekly way, to opt out of it — and to offer a place where the food is good, the principles are sound, and the tribal membership card is not required.
Just eat well. The rest is noise.