For anyone curious, no, Sanders is not a vegan. He sticks to a mostly meat-and-vegetables diet, according to a Jan. 20 People magazine profile. His stepdaughter Carina Driscoll might have put it best: “He was Paleo before Paleo was a thing,” she told People.

Sanders has also been treated for gout, according to his doctor, a condition sometimes tied to over-consumption of meat. He even wrote the foreword to a 2010 book called “Good Meat: The Complete Guide to Sourcing and Cooking Sustainable Meat.” (People notes that Sanders likes to grill.)

So where did all the questions come from?

It’s a bit of a mystery. Sure, there’s been some talk about Sanders’s record on animal welfare. He received a perfect score from the Humane Society Legislative Fund last year. And eight days ago, a Reddit user mentioned that he as a “history of pro-animal voting.” The post now has 99 comments.

And sure, there is a community of vegans online who support Sanders and believe others should too (see Vegans for Bernie on Facebook and Twitter, along with these posts):

But there are just as many Internet users worried about Big Government Veganism:

Could some of this explain the sudden rush of interest in Bernie’s diet? It’s hard to say.

We’ll leave you with excerpts from Sanders’s Good Meat foreword, where he endorses organic, local food production:

“In my view, the challenge that we now face, in terms of food production, is to break up the dangerous concentration of ownership that exists in agriculture and the food industry, and do everything we can to protect and expand family-based organic and local food production.”

And makes no bones about the fact he likes eating meat: