I crave meat too much, isn't it natural to want it?
Short answer: Craving meat is real, but it's mostly learned habit, not a deficiency signal. Cravings are conditioned responses that fade once you stop feeding them.
Little evidence cravings track nutritional need. A cue triggers a learned urge for a specific food, and what's learned can be unlearned.
The Conversation; PubMed (2020), on food cravings
The objection
“I crave meat constantly. That’s my body telling me it needs it, it’s natural, we evolved to eat it, you can’t fight biology.”
The answer
Two claims are tangled here, and they come apart cleanly.
“My body needs it.” This is the weaker one. There’s little evidence that food cravings track nutritional deficiency, and the appealing idea that a steak craving means you’re short on iron doesn’t hold up in the research (The Conversation). Cravings are overwhelmingly a conditioned response. A cue (the smell of bacon, a Friday-night routine, an advert) triggers a learned urge, and the urge is for the specific food you’ve repeatedly paired with that cue rather than for a nutrient (PubMed, 2020). What’s conditioned can be un-conditioned. Stop feeding the craving and, over weeks, it fades. Whatever iron, zinc, B12 or protein offers, plants and a B12 supplement cover.
“It’s natural / we evolved to.” Partly true, and irrelevant to whether you should. Yes, humans evolved as opportunistic omnivores, but “natural” only describes the urge, it doesn’t license acting on it. We evolved to crave sugar and fat too, and nobody argues that obliges us to. The whole point of being a moral agent is that we routinely override evolved impulses when they cause needless harm. The fact that an urge has deep roots tells you why it’s strong, not whether you should act on it.
Meat cravings are genuinely strong and genuinely learned. “Natural” explains the pull without justifying the harm. And learned things can be unlearned. Most ex-meat-eaters report the craving simply goes.