79% of Gen Z Now Goes Meatless One Day A Week

It was reported in January that Netflix’s title, Fool Me Once, saw over 3B viewing minutes - the first Original to do so since before the strikes. While the trades have focused on the success of Fool Me Once as one of the year’s biggest titles, it’s worth looking closer at the overshadowed success of that buzzy and provocative documentary, You Are What You Eat, which came in at January's #5 most streamed title just behind this series, The Brothers Sun, The Crown, and Reacher.

By now, you’ve probably heard a friend in your personal network reference You Are What You Eat as the latest case to be made for going meatless. The premise is that a group of identical twins changed their diet and lifestyle for 8 weeks in a scientific experiment designed to explore how food impacts the body. While we’ve seen other titles like this over the years that make a compelling case for going meatless - from What The Health to Seaspiracy - the recent pop of this "twin experiment" is a trend signal reflective of a significantly larger Gen Z-ism.

According to a recent study, 79% of Gen Z goes meatless one day a week. The term “Flexitarian” has over 52M views on TikTok. Underneath this movement however, is “climate anxiety”. Going meatless, in many ways, is arguably an allegory for Gen Z’s mental health and how they are navigating inheriting this complicated world: it’s a means to control what, at times, can feel like a world so out of their control. While experts spend a lot of time linking young people’s mental health issues with social media, a recent study from Yale makes the case that “climate anxiety” is equally weighing on Gen Z's mental health -- with over half of 16-25 year olds reportedly feeling very or extremely worried about climate change. As one of Yale's experts put it in the report, while “social anxiety…can be managed with continued exposure to social situations with the help of a mental health professional…climate change can feel like an insurmountable threat…it’s really difficult to find an action step that’s going to assure people that the fear, the existential threat, is going to dissipate.”