Author Jonathan Safran Foer is once again urging people to give up eating meat, following news of workers in meat plants becoming ill with COVID-19.

Foer, the author of Everything Is Illuminated and a longtime, outspoken vegetarian, issued his plea in an op-ed for the New York Times titled “The End of Meat Is Here.”

“An astonishing six out of 10 counties that the White House itself identified as coronavirus hot spots are home to the very slaughterhouses the president ordered open,” Foer wrote. “We cannot protect against pandemics while continuing to eat meat regularly.”

He continued, “Can we really displace meat from the center of our plates? This is the question that brings us to the threshold of the impossible. On the other side is the inevitable.”

Foer famously outlined his beef with meat in the 2009 book Eating Animals, which was adapted into a documentary in 2018.

Foer’s op-ed quickly began trending on Twitter, drawing reactions from both supporters and detractors of the author’s pro-vegetarian take.

“I love burgers. Love,” tweeted the Times’ Bari Weiss. “But working on this piece reminded me of what I try to avoid: eating them comes with too high a cost.”

Writer Amee Vanderpool sort of agreed with Foer, writing, “You don’t even have to stop eating meat, just lower your consumption—it benefits everyone, including yourself.”

Dean Browning, a politician running for Congress in Pennsylvania, took issue with Foer’s op-ed, tweeting, “The end of meat is not here. We can eat what we want. It’s a free country.”

And Mikhaila Peterson, who claims that eating a beef-heavy diet helped solve her health problems, wrote, “Jonathan Safran Foer is a miseducated fear monger. How about focusing on regenerative agriculture instead of PC BS?”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.