Anthony Chaffee is dressed in a tight gray T-shirt that shows off his muscular physique. He works at a private medical practice in Australia that specializes in functional medicine, an umbrella term popularized in the 1990s to describe unregulated alternative medicine. He is telling me, as he tells many of his patients, that the solution to dealing with the threat posed by vegetables is to choose meat over almost all other types of food.
“Plants are trying to kill you,” Chaffee says within the first few minutes of our first video call. “We have some defenses, and that’s why some plants are edible, but they still cause harm with long-term exposure over years and decades,” he continues, comparing the long-term health impacts of eating salad to those of cigarettes and alcohol.
