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Is it news that people are angry with Marjorie Taylor Greene?

This week, the Georgia Republican took advantage of Twitter’s newly liberalized character restrictions to do what she does best: suggest something unhinged, and sit back while her political opponents’ heads explode in white-hot rage.

“We need a national divorce,” she tweeted. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this.” The next day, she followed up by elaborating that she would like to see “a legal agreement” that would separate states to resolve ideological and political disagreements “while maintaining our legal union.” Rearranged this way, Americans can decide where and how to live, Greene concluded, and “we don’t have to argue with one another anymore.”

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

The Republican representative’s words prompted the outcry you’d expect from Democrats and columnists who questioned both her loyalty to the country and Republican leaders’ cowardice in refusing to rein her in. But Greene’s ideas are not as radical as some might be inclined to think. First, because what she’s calling for sounds not unlike Ronald Reagan’s idea of federalism. Second, because Greene is hardly the first person to suggest that the political party in power is making the United States wholly unlivable. I’m old enough to remember all the liberals who swore they’d move to Canada if Donald Trump won in 2016. (They didn’t!)

What’s interesting about Greene’s call for a “national divorce” is how it fits into a much longer history of similar calls for secession or disunion in American history—and what the growing frequency of such calls tells us about this particular modern political moment. “That it keeps coming up suggests there is something to it, and waving it away with reminders of Appomattox or quotes from Texas v. White probably isn’t going to cut it,” Richard Kreitner, the author of the 2020 book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union, told me. This persistent theme in our politics, he added, “represents an impulse that cannot be simply wished away or ignored.”

This week, I talked with Kreitner about that constant theme—and whether it’s time for the people of the United States to reassess their 250-year union.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Elaine Godfrey: So Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that there should be a “national divorce” between red and blue states. Obviously, this is what Greene is good at—saying something wild, getting a reaction. What was yours?

Richard Kreitner: Calls for secession have been becoming more common, louder, and have come from more prominent figures in the 21st century. So it’s not too surprising to find somebody in House Republican leadership embracing the idea.

She’s calling for a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union. That’s federalism. We can have arguments about what exactly that means, what the Founders thought it should mean, but she’s just arguing that the states should have more powers over things than the federal government. That’s the debate we’ve been having in American politics for decades.

So, to wrap it in this banner of “national divorce” seems to me to be taking advantage of all the talk of a second civil war, the boogaloo bois, and the secession talk that is growing in prominence. But each side has been talking about secession for many years—when they’re out of power. When they’re in power, they say, “Oh no, you can’t do that. That’s treasonous.”

Godfrey: When I think of secession, I think of the Civil War, and then I think of Texas. But you’ve written about how it goes back to the very beginning—how the United States has never been all that united.

Kreitner: My book starts by pointing out that the colonial period lasted 150 years—a very long time, about the same amount of time since our Civil War. And during that time, America was disunited. The colonies were, as Marjorie Taylor Greene would have them now, totally independent of one another. Their only relationship, their only political relationship, was with England itself, and that was a fairly loose relationship.

So this was the original state of things in America, one that the colonists themselves liked very much. They had control over their own affairs; there was very little meddling.

Occasionally, somebody—William Penn, Benjamin Franklin—would have the idea that it would be better to organize some kind of federation of the colonies, with Britain’s approval, to organize trade, land disputes, border issues, relationships with the Indians, and mutual defense. Every time somebody proposed that idea, they were laughed out of the room, because people considered the very idea of union to be antithetical to their cherished liberties.

Forming a union was kind of the last thing on their mind. Then we get to the Revolution. A lot of us are taught in school that the Revolution was fought to create a union, to create a nation. And it’s the exact opposite of that. The Union was created as a means to the end of securing independence from England. It was a last resort.

John Adams, when he goes to Philadelphia, is talking about how different Americans are from one another, how much they hate each other. George Washington in the Continental Army camp outside Boston in 1775 is talking about how much the New Englanders smell. Anytime these politicians meet in the Continental Congress, they’re described as a conclave of ambassadors from different nations. Many of them think a union will not survive after the war.

No golden age of American unity exists that you can point to and say, “That’s when we were united.” Even back then, people were issuing threats of secession when they were out of power, and then defending the Union as perpetual and inviolable once they had the power. Thomas Jefferson does this famous turnaround. In 1798, he mulls whether to threaten secession because he doesn’t like Adams’s administration. Then he wins the election of 1800, and says, “We must hold the Union together at any cost!” The people backing Adams now proposed secession.

Godfrey: Because of the Civil War, we think of secessionist calls as primarily reactionary. Are we right about that?

Kreitner: When I was researching, I was especially interested in whether there were any people whose values and ideals I shared—who had espoused the idea of secession not for white-supremacist reasons or to preserve slavery. I quickly landed on the abolitionists.

Many were in favor of northern secession from the Union in the years right before the Civil War. Their argument was gaining traction in the 1850s because they thought that participation in the Union was an important pillar in maintaining the institution of slavery. They thought that without the guarantee of the federal government’s aid to suppress an insurrection among the enslaved—which is the constitutional guarantee of the Fugitive Slave Act—slavery would be a much more insecure institution, the price of slaves would plummet, and the institution would die out.

John Quincy Adams, back in Congress after his presidency, introduced a petition from a group of citizens from a small town in Massachusetts demanding the dissolution of the United States, because they didn’t want their tax dollars to go toward the support of slavery anymore. These were ordinary American heroes, far from traitors.

Godfrey: Obviously the secession of the southern states was the big culmination of many years of those sentiments. When did we start hearing them again after the Civil War?

Kreitner: The Civil War was a national trauma; nearly a million people died. The fear of disunion persisted in American politics. The idea went underground for years.

In the 1890s, the populist movement and the rise of socialism in the United States were both opposed on the grounds that they were disunionist movements. Populism in the 1930s also dabbles in secessionism. That’s when a bill is introduced in a state legislature calling for secession for the first time since the Civil War, in North Dakota. Then in the ’60s, it starts to become an ethnic thing. There was the Republic of New Afrika, a movement of Black Americans in northern cities that called for the surrender of five southern states as a form of reparations for slavery. Then Hispanic Americans demanded the return of the Southwest that was lost in the Mexican-American War as a sovereign homeland. From a hippie newspaper published on the Lower East Side came a call for the creation of what was called the Underground States of America, which would be a kind of hippie confederacy. Lesbian separatist communes also envisioned themselves as secessionists.

Obviously, these were not order-shattering movements, but the idea lingered. Secession has always been available to malcontents of one kind or another. It defines American history.

Godfrey: So Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tweets are not representative of some new treasonous trend?

Kreitner: The trend is old in the sense that American politics is starting to look rather similar to the way it was in the beginning, which was extremely fractured, totally dysfunctional, with foreign enemies prowling around the perimeter to see what kind of discord they could scare up, and real questions about whether the Union could survive.

We didn’t get through because of some predestined outcome; there’s no guarantee that we’re going to stay together. In many cases, our staying together had to do with mere chance and fear of the unknown—particularly fear of the economic consequences of disunion.

Godfrey: You’re saying that the frequency of these calls is not surprising, but that we should pay attention to them.

Kreitner: We’re totally undecided on this fundamental question of “Do we want to be a multiracial democracy or not?” While we persist in having that fundamental argument, we’re going to see political tensions. And when you see that in American history, you see secessionist movements.

So the course of growing hatred, rancor, and constitutional paralysis continues. I charted quite exactly from 2004, when there were memes going around showing maps separating “Jesusland” from the United States of Canada, to 2012, when you saw all these petitions from every state in the country arguing for secession. Then, of course, in 2016, you have Calexit.

California Representative Zoe Lofgren talked about secession after the 2016 election. She said: “Rational people, not the fringe, are now talking about whether states could be separated from the U.S.” I don’t know if anybody’s quoted her in relation to Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I can’t imagine her response today would be: “Oh boy, I guess we both have this idea! Maybe let’s have a substantive conversation about the merits and the drawbacks of being in one country together.”

[Peter Wehner: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s civil war]

In the coming years, especially with the Supreme Court so heavily stacked in favor of the right, the left is going to have a lot more cause for talking about secession than the right. And I think that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s screed—insane and stupid as it is—is an invitation that should be accepted: to talk concretely about whether this thing is working or not.

Godfrey: What would the result of that conversation be?

Kreitner: I don’t know what the end of it is. But the beginning is—instead of piling on and saying, “This is treason. You can’t talk about that; it’s un-American”—that we actually are capable of not only having conversations but also making decisions about what kind of country and what kind of government we want to have.

After all, we’re not seeing any positive arguments for the union. You look at all the commentary, and you don’t see any soaring odes to our shared nationality, why it’s important for us to remain together as a people. My response to Greene is not “I must remain united with this person at any cost,” but “Why would I want to be part of a government where this person is a leading figure? Why would I want to remain loyal to a Constitution so patently broken that somebody like this ascends to the highest ranks of power?”

I don’t have a programmatic view of what should happen, no firm sense of where to draw the new borders or what to do with people stuck behind enemy lines, only an understanding, based on my reading of American history, that this is a persistent theme in our politics and represents an impulse that cannot simply be wished away or ignored.

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Last month, at a dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself thrown completely off guard by a strip of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat, which, like most Americans, I’ve tried before but never truly craved in the way that I’ve craved real meat. But even before I tried the bacon, or even saw it, I could tell it was different. The aroma of salt, smoke, and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen seemed unmistakably real. The crispy bacon strips looked the part too—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented on a miniature BLT. Then crunch gave way to satisfying chew, followed by a burst of hickory and the incomparable juiciness of animal fat.

I knew it wasn’t real bacon, but for a moment, it fooled me. The bacon was indeed made from plants, just like the burger patties you can buy from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it had been mixed with real pork fat. Well, kind of. What marbled the meat had not come from a butchered pig but a living hog whose fat cells had been sampled and grown in a vat.

This lab-grown fat, or “cultivated fat,” was made by Mission Barns, a San Francisco start-up, with one purpose: to win people over to plant-based meat. And a lot of people need to be won over, it seems. The plant-based-meat industry, which a few years ago seemed destined for mainstream success, is now struggling. Once the novelty of seeing plant protein “bleed” wore off, the high price, middling nutrition, and just-okay flavor of plant-based meat has become harder for consumers to overlook, food analysts told me. In 2021 and 2022, many of the fast-food chains that had once given plant-based meat a national platform—Burger King, Dunkin’, McDonald’s—lost interest in selling it. In the past four months, the two most visible plant-based-meat companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, have each announced layoffs.

Meanwhile, the future of meat alternatives—lab-grown meat that is molecularly identical to the real deal—is at least several years away, lodged between science fiction than reality. But we can’t wait until then to eat less meat; it’s one of the single best things that regular people can do for the climate, and also helps address concerns about animal suffering and health. Lab-grown fat might be the bridge. It is created using the same approach as lab-grown meat, but it’s far simpler to make and can be mixed into existing plant-based foods, Elysabeth Alfano, the CEO of the investment firm VegTech Invest, told me. As such, it’s likely to become commercially available far sooner—maybe even within the next few years. Maybe all it will take to save fake meat is a little animal fat.

Animal fat is culinary magic. It creates the juiciness of a burger, and leaves a buttery coat on the tongue. Its absence is the reason that chicken breasts taste so bland. Fat, the chef Samin Nosrat wrote in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is “a source of both rich flavor and of a particular desired texture.” The fake meat on the market now is definitely lacking in the flavor and texture departments. Most products approximate meatiness using a concoction of plant oils, flavorings, binders, and salt, which is certainly meatier than the bean burgers that came before it, but is far from perfect: The food blog Serious Eats, for instance, has pointed out off-putting flavor notes, at least prior to cooking, including coconut and cat food. On a molecular level, plant fat is ill-equipped to mimic its animal counterpart. Coconut oil, common in plant-based meat, is solid at room temperature but melts under relatively low heat, so it spills out into the pan while cooking. As a result, the mouthfeel of plant-based meat tends to be more greasy than sumptuous.

Replacing those plant oils with cultivated animal fat, which keeps its structure when heated, would maintain the flavor and juiciness people expect of real meat, Audrey Gyr, the start-up innovation specialist at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for plant-based substitutes, told me. In a sense, the technique of using animal fat to flavor plants is hardly new. Chicken schmaltz has long lent rich nuttiness to potato latkes; rendered guanciale is what gives a classic amatriciana its succulence. Plant-based bacon enhanced with pork fat follows from the same culinary tradition, but it’s very high-tech. Fat cells sampled from a live animal are grown in huge bioreactors and fed with plant-derived sugars, proteins, and other growth components. In time, they multiply to form a mass of fat cells: a soft, pale solid with robust flavor, the same white substance you might see encircling a pork chop or marbling a steak.

Out of the bioreactor, the fat “looks a little bit like margarine,” Ed Steele, a co-founder of the London-based cultivated-fat company Hoxton Farms, told me. It is a complicated process, but far easier than engineering cultivated meat, which involves many cell types that must be coaxed into rigid muscle fibers. Fat involves one type of cell and is most useful as a formless blob. Just as in the human body, all it takes is time, space, and a steady drip of sugars, oils, and other fats, Eitan Fischer, CEO of Mission Barns, told me. The bacon I’d tried at the tasting had been constructed by layering cultivated fat with plant-based protein, curing and smoking the loaf, then slicing it into bacon-like strips. Mixing just 10 percent cultivated fat with plant-based protein by mass, Steele said, can make a product taste and feel like the real thing.

Already, cultivated-fat products are within sight. Mission Barns plans to incorporate its cultivated fat into its own plant-based products; Hoxton Farms hopes to sell its fat directly to existing plant-based-meat manufacturers. Other companies, such as the Belgian start-up Peace of Meat, the Berlin-based Cultimate Foods, and Singapore’s fish-focused ImpacFat, are also working on their own versions of cultivated fat. In theory, the fat can be mixed into virtually any type of plant-based meat—nuggets, sausages, paté. In the U.S., a path to market is already being cleared. Last November, cultivated chicken from the California start-up Upside Foods received FDA clearance; now it’s waiting on additional clearance from the Department of Agriculture. Pending its own regulatory approvals, Mission Barns says it is ready to launch its products in a few supermarkets and restaurants, which also include a convincingly porky plant-based meatball I also tried at the tasting. (Due to the pending approval, I had to sign a liability waiver before digging in.)

I left the tasting with animal fat on my lips and a new conviction in my mind: At the right price, I’d buy this bacon over the regular stuff. Because cultivated fat can be made without harming animals—the fat cells in the bacon I tasted came from a happily free-ranging pig named Dawn, a PR rep for Mission Barns told me—it may appeal to flexitarians like myself who just want to eat less meat.

Although there’s no guarantee it would taste as good at home as it did when prepared by Mission Barns’s private chef, with its realistic texture and flavor, cultivated fat could solve the main issue plaguing plant-based meat: It just doesn’t taste that good. Cultivated fat is “the next step in making environmentally friendly foods more palatable to the average consumer,” Jennifer Bartashus, a packaged-food analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, told me.

But cultivated fat still faces some of the same problems that have turned America off plant-based meat. The current products for sale are not particularly healthy, and cultivated fat would not change that fact. Building consumer trust and familiarity may also be an issue. Some people are leery of plant-based products because they’re confused about what they’re made of. The more complex notion of cultivated fat may be just as unappetizing, if not more so. “We still don’t know exactly how consumers are going to feel about cultivated fat,” Gyr said. Certainly, finding a catchy name for these products would help, but I have struggled to find a term less clunky than “plant-based meat flavored with cultivated animal fat” to describe what I ate. Unless cultivated-fat companies really nail their marketing, they could go the way of “blended meat”—mixtures of plant-based protein and real meat introduced by three meat companies in 2019, which was “a bit of a marketing failure,” Gyr said.

Above all, though, is the price relative to that of traditional meat. Plant-based meat’s higher cost has partly been blamed for the industry’s slump, and products containing cultivated fat, in all likelihood, will not be cheaper in the near future. Neither founder I spoke with shared specific numbers; Fischer, of Mission Barns, said only that the company’s small production scale makes it “fairly expensive” compared with traditional meat products, while Steele said his hope is that companies using Hoxton Farms’ cultivated fat in their plant-based-meat recipes won’t have to spend more than they do now.  

Despite these obstacles, cultivated fat is promising for the flagging plant-based-meat industry because of the fact that it is absolutely delicious. Cultivated fat could “lead to a new round of innovation that will pull consumers back in,” Bartashus said. After all, plant-based and real meat could reach cost parity around 2026, at which point even more companies might want to get in on meat alternatives. Cultivated fat might warm us up to the future of fully cultivated meat. With enough time, lab-grown chicken breasts could become as boring as regular chicken breasts.

Enthusiasm about cultivated fat, and fake meat in general, has a distinctly techno-optimist flavor, as if persuading all meat eaters to embrace plants gussied up in bacon grease will be easy. “Eventually our goal is to outcompete current conventional meat prices, whether it’s meatballs or bacon,” Fischer said. But even as the problems with eating meat have only become clearer, meat consumption in the U.S. has continued to rise. Globally, meat consumption in countries such as India and China is expected to skyrocket in the coming years. At the very least, cultivated fat provides consumers with another option at a time when eating a steak for one meal and then opting for plant-based meat the next can count as a win.

Since the tasting, I’ve often thought about why eating the bacon left me feeling so perplexed. When I gnawed on the crispy golden edge of one of the strips, I knew I was eating real bacon fat, but my brain still wrestled with the idea that it had not come directly from a piece of pork. I’ve only ever known a world where animal fat comes from slaughtered animals. That is changing. If cultivated fat can tide the plant-based-meat industry over until lab-grown meat becomes a reality, these new products will have done their part. In the meantime, we may come to find that they’re already good enough.