“Meatfluencers” are telling their followers to eat a carnivorous diet — ideally including raw liver and animal testicles — to cure so-called “diseases of civilization.” Yet even the Roman legionaries and German soldiers they hold up as examples of masculinity might have had something to say about that.
The most popular meatfluencer at the moment, Brian Johnson, who has 2.3 million followers on Instagram.
BERLIN — There was a time in human history when eating meat was a question of survival, then it became a marker of religious differences — and now it is a political statement. Identity politics has imbued the most uncontroversial everyday decisions with heavy political symbolism. Those on the left have spotted racism in areas such as walking, cycling and prenatal care. For the right-wing, eating meat has become a kind of fetish, an unabashed identity marker.
But this obsession with meat is not just a way of proclaiming that you belong to the barbecue-stoking, gas-guzzling section of society. It is not just about eating pork as a way of defending the West against Islamization — every pork chop a tiny crusade. Recently, so-called meatfluencers have also been recommending that their followers adopt a carnivorous diet as a way of treating so-called “diseases of civilization.”
The “Lion Diet” is touted as a way of treating the negative effects of Western decadence. The women adopting it are mainly looking to lose weight, have more energy and overcome a diverse range of vaguely defined health issues. The meatfluencer itscourtneyluna promises her 113,000+ TikTok followers that, if they follow her recipe for carnivore gnocchi, they too can have impressive before-and-after pictures like those she posts online. Another meatfluencer lays her cards on the table with the username “Steak and butter gal.”
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
It is only recently that women have started to appear on the meatfluencer scene. The cult of carnivorism began in the so-called manosphere. That is the name for a whole host of influencers who want to teach insecure young people with XY chromosomes how to be men again. Real men.
In this parallel world, meat-heavy diets saw a surge in popularity when the psychologist and conservative manosphere apologist Jordan Peterson announced in 2018 that he was following a diet made up of only salt, beef and water. A more unexpected carnivore is the Austrian writer Clemens Setz, who told Die Welt in 2021 that his experience as a vegetarian had made him ill. After turning to a meat-and-animal-products-only diet, he claimed that all his health issues, from indigestion to depression and impotence, quickly cleared up.
The Liver King’s testicle promise
Virility is a central promise of the male meatfluencer scene. Not least because the entire cult is based on the idea that Stone Age people mainly ate meat, and therefore adopting a similar diet would allow us to return to that time of aggression and manliness, before we were plagued by diseases of civilization.
The most popular meatfluencer at the moment, Brian Johnson (2.3 million Instagram followers), who goes by the name Liver King, declares that the most efficient way for cavemen to get calories was from protein, by hunting and killing large animals.
The question “What makes a man?” is a symptom of the crisis of masculinity in the early 21st century.
But the link between meat and the manosphere originally comes from outdated ideas that protein-rich food has an aphrodisiac effect on the body — and not from the desire to return to the Stone Age. In the past, it was believed that eating an animal’s testicles would make a man’s genitalia grow larger.
Johnson, the Liver King, asked his followers the rhetorical question: “Why eat vegetables, when you can eat testicles?” The promise behind this is that their own testicles will then become larger and more potent. Anyone who falls for that has no right to feel superior to those who believe in traditional Chinese medicine’s claims that if men eat powdered rhino horn, their penises will become as hard as the horn itself.
Still, a meat-only diet is a decadent fad that can only be adopted by people living in our modern, safe society — where deficiencies and weakness don’t immediately mean losing the fight for survival. Real men, who’ve fought in real wars — not just shadow-boxing with diseases of civilization — know that eating only meat would make them weak.
Romans and Nazis and John Wayne
Sometimes it is helpful to think of the Roman Empire. The historian of ancient Rome Hans Oppermann — who, it should be noted, was a Nazi, but who is therefore a reliable witness when it comes to traditional masculinity — wrote that Julius Caesar’s soldiers were given 850g of wheat every day (gluten allergies were obviously not a thing then). The wheat was ground with a hand mill, the mola manuaria, which a group of eight legionaries, a contubernium, carried around with them, and then made into a kind of polenta or flatbread: “Meat was only used when there were shortages. When soldiers are given meat to eat, it is a sign that supplies are running low.” Oppermann also drew on his own experience: “When we were gaining ground quickly in France in 1940, when no bread reached us for a few days, we were constantly hungry, despite having plenty of meat.”
Today, Roman legionaries and German soldiers fighting in France might be seen as examples of toxic masculinity, but they were undoubtedly men. And as such, they were certainly not always thinking and talking about what made someone a “real man.” Of course they taught their sons phrases like “boys don’t cry” or Roman values such as “auctoritas, gravitas and firmitas” and showed them how to sharpen knives or mend a bicycle. But those were traditions, not debates raging in the public forum.
And this kind of discussion is nowhere to be found among the icons of masculinity from the early 20th century. John Wayne, Jean Gabin, Hans Albers and Humphrey Bogart, and the characters they played, were simply men doing what they believed a man had to do. Food was the domain of women, and any man who gave it too much thought was dismissed as possibly gay.
What makes a man?
The question “What makes a man?” is a symptom of the crisis of masculinity in the early 21st century. By definition, anyone who poses the question, is not a man — or at least not the kind of man that Jordan Peterson’s fans aspire to be.
The same is true of the Liver King’s fans. The influencer looks like some kind of circus attraction, with bulging muscles that would actually have been a hindrance in hand-to-hand combat as a legionary or gladiator, and would have made him better suited to form part of a lion’s protein-rich diet.
Be wary of posers who run their mouths off about carnivorous diets.
Therefore the sad news for all male meatfluencer fans is this: eating meat doesn’t make you a man. The more you watch your protein gurus’ videos and talk about your diet, the less of a man you will be. Having a wrestler’s body like the Liver King is “camp,” in Susan Sontag’s definition of the term, and perhaps even unintentionally queer. That is hardly what the 17-year-olds struggling through puberty are hoping to get from the manosphere influencers.
If there are still real men to be found, look for them elsewhere. Look for people who know how to repair things, who can keep them working, who coach children’s football teams, are on the school’s PTA and place more emphasis on duty that on self-actualization. And be wary of posers who run their mouths off about carnivorous diets, with bits of gristle caught between their teeth.