While promoting the 3D concert film for her “Hit Me Hard and Soft” tour, Elle Magazine asked Billie Eilish what hill she was willing to die on.
“Y’all not gonna like me for this one,” the musician cautioned viewers in the video, which was posted on April 28. “Eating meat is inherently wrong.”
“Two things cannot coincide: ‘I love animals, I love all animals so much,’ and ‘I eat meat,’” Eilish said. “You can’t do both. Sorry. You can eat meat! Go for it! You can love animals. But you can’t do both.”
Her response immediately sparked backlash across the internet — and even within her own fanbase — eliciting disgruntled responses that called her “privileged” and “out of touch.”
“I love you, Billie,” one TikTok user said. “But I do both.”
“This is a terrible take,” another said.
“This is inherent privilege,” one commenter said. “Many eat meat to survive. We can’t all afford a plant-based diet.”
The video clip has continued making the rounds on the internet in the weeks since. In the wake of the backlash, Eilish doubled down on her Instagram, sharing footage of animals being slaughtered for beef, pork, and poultry.
“Go watch a documentary or two and some footage of what is done to the animals you claim to love and what it does to the planet you pretend to love as well,” she wrote in an Instagram story.
“If that footage was hard for you to watch, I encourage you to please take a look at yourself. Like, I am so tired of standing up for [and] having empathy for living beings being controversial.”
Eilish has been a vegan since she was 12-years-old.
“I learned about the dairy industry and the meat industry, which I already knew about,” Eilish said in a 2021 British Vogue interview. “Once you know about that kind of thing and you see it, it’s really hard to go back.”
“And, even now, while I have many friends that eat dairy and meat and I don’t want to tell anybody what to do, I just can’t go on in my life knowing what’s going on in the animal world and not doing anything about it.”
For Eilish, being vegan isn’t just a personal lifestyle decision anymore; It is something that is now factored into every career choice.
According to Reverb, Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” tour funded 7.7 million plant-based meals for people in need through her family’s nonprofit, Support+Feed. By serving plant-based meals on tour to crewmembers, it also diverted 5 million pounds of food from landfills.
Additionally, 36,036 fans joined a month-long Support+Feed campaign where they pledged to eat one plant-based meal a day for 30 days.
Being vegan is just one facet of Eilish’s environmental advocacy. Her tour apparel uses recycled, upcycled, and organic materials with nontoxic dyes and water-based inks — and even upcycles “deadstock” that was destined for the landfill into new merch.
Across all legs of the tour, Eilish and her team chose the most sustainable and practical transportation methods available, selecting buses, ferries, trains, or commercial flights to reduce the tour’s carbon footprint.
“Know Before You Go” maps and park-and-ride shuttle programs in select cities helped fans get to tour venues sustainably as well. In Los Angeles, she even covered the public transportation costs for fans in collaboration with the LA Metro.
Every tour venue had a Support+Feed campaign sign that read: “When you eat one plant-based meal a day for a year, you save water equivalent to 11,400 showers and pollution equivalent to 3,000 miles driven.”
According to a study from the University of Oxford, a vegan diet is generally less expensive than a meat-based diet, often reducing food costs by 15% to 35%.
However, the same researchers did point out that healthy, high-protein vegan meals remain largely inaccessible to people living in low-income countries.
The researchers invited lawmakers and political leaders to strive towards expanded access to healthy and sustainable vegan food.
“Any of the healthy and sustainable dietary patterns we looked at are a better option for health, the environment, and financially, but development support and progressive food policies are needed to make them both affordable and desirable everywhere,” said Marco Springmann, researcher on the Oxford Martin Program on the Future of Food.
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Header image via Petros Studio / Live Nation Concerts
