On the same day that the USDA unveiled a new food pyramid, an inversion of the old one (which was actually retired in 2011 and replaced with “MyPlate”), I saw a video of an ICE agent walking around Minneapolis with a grievously clenched ass. It could have been just the sheer weight of his tactical gear, but I don’t think so; the other agents weren’t walking like that, there was something ineffably different about his gait, the sort of tightassed step associated with a gravely compacted “Hank Hill” colon. Then again, I could have been hallucinating it thanks to subliminal communication from the new food pyramid. As I said, it’s upside-down, with a heavy smorgasbord of t-bone steak, whole milk, and cheese all bearing down on a single grain of brown rice. Around the same time as the food pyramid debut, the New York Times ran a feature on beef tallow, the voguish MAHA saturated fat obtained by rendering drippings from cow parts, and a dramatic chiaroscuro image of the Prince of Darkness himself was posted to the official HHS and White House Instagram pages, declaring: “WE’RE ENDING THE WAR ON PROTEIN.” 

That there’s a war on protein is news to anyone even faintly aware of the cultural atmosphere of America today. Protein is everywhere, in everything, in places it has no business being. (If you find yourself even remotely tempted to order a protein-enhanced iced coffee, seek spiritual guidance.) This is at least partially related to aggressive marketing and prescription of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. A high-protein diet is important for people taking GLP-1’s to prevent rapid loss of muscle tissue as the drugs do to your metabolism what a year in a high-control cult does to your mind. It’s ironic that this is driving demand for protein even higher than it already was. The Standard American Diet (aptly, “SAD”) is a menu of agricultural subsidies, principally for corn and beef. Americans’ overconsumption of protein from red meat (a tiny percent of the nation’s population consumes about half the beef eaten here annually) is a major contributor to our epidemic levels of cardiometabolic disorders, including Type II diabetes, which is what GLP-1’s were developed to treat. Amor fati, to be locked in a self-reinforcing protein death spiral with thousands of the angriest boomers in the world. 

The specter of a “war on protein,” ridiculous as it is, is still critical for RFK Jr.’s actual objective with HHS: to convert the federal health bureaucracy into a patronage network for his favored industries. Take the new food pyramid again. Though he assured this wouldn’t happen (and who among us was stupid enough to believe him?), the NYT reported that three of nine members of his panel that developed the new guidelines have gotten grants or consulted for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association; two of those three plus one more have similar financial ties to the National Dairy Council; one is the “co-creator of a high-protein meal replacement product.” Are we really surprised at this sudden rediscovery of the supposedly occulted health benefits of waste products from these industries? Consider the market for beef tallow, valued at around $10 billion in 2024 and swelling faster than a exurban dealership guy’s duodenum. What was previously offloaded for pennies and turned into “sustainable airplane fuel” now retails for up to $15/lb and podcasters slather it on their faces. The vegan blog “Gentle World” puts it in plain terms: “This premium pricing model transforms tallow from a revenue-reducing waste product into a source of considerable profits.” Dairy industry page “The Bullvine” is similarly bullish on colostrum, the first milk a cow produces after giving birth, urging dairy farmers to “Stop Dumping Profits and Tap Your Dairy’s Liquid Gold.” Consider whey, the liquid left over from milk or cheese production. It was previously used as fertilizer or so-called “low value animal feed,” or simply dumped into waterways. Now that America is Healthy Again, you can buy it, dried out and marketed as protein powder, in $30-$60 tubs. You have to be a motherfucking idiot to think that RFK Jr. is championing the secret beneficial substances that doctors are too afraid to tell you about. What he’s doing is using the power vested in him by the US government to cram factory farming byproducts down your throat so that his friends can make more money.

Of course, as I’ve written, MAHA is marketing, and has been successful in mobilizing industrial wastes in the correct emotional register to get sales. Online, you can find plenty of illiterate gen Z “homesteaders,” storing their folate-free flour in plastic bins, feeding their newborns unpasteurized honey, and intoning, as they scramble eggs in bacon fat, that if beef tallow was good enough for our grandmothers it’s good enough for us. This is very telling. Great-grandma here is a metonym for pre- or non-industrial society. Metonymical great-grandma maybe slaughtered one cow a year if she was lucky, and needed to eat all of it for practical reasons; for her, eating beef tallow was a way to minimize waste. For us, beef tallow is waste, waste that, in order to facilitate profit accumulation and capital flows, has to find a mouth, a gullet, a small intestine to clog up. I’ve also written before about how the “productive relationship” that is disordered in MAHA is that between individual and System. Hither the MAHA neuroses about vaccines, or food safety regulations, or pasteurization – generally, the things that make the System work. It turns out, they can make you choke down endless waste products from that very same System and even induce you to pay for the privilege if they can successfully tap into and manipulate your anxieties about the modern world, about the System, and about the technological clockwork that makes it “go.” 

These anxieties are anxieties about bodily integrity in the face of global systems that threaten to disperse and de-densify the individual body. Flowing is gay, flowing is soy, flowing is what the system needs, flowing connects you and your body out into that big scary System, flowing de-densifies your body, leaches your precious fluids, compromises the subjectivity that is your last and only bulwark against huge and anonymous global networks. There are definitely elements of purging in the defense mechanisms arrayed against these anxieties, but they don’t involve drinking a lot of water to flush out contaminants (sanitarians these folks are decidedly not). The purging impulse isn’t really about contamination per se as much as the silent colonization and transformation of the body’s tissues by the invisible products of the System. There may not be microchips in the Covid shots, but mRNA itself, an endogenous product of our bodies, is imbued with a sinister technological purpose and agenda when incorporated into vaccines. Instead of flushing or detoxing, the purging operations involve outright assault on the suspect tissues of the body or the body politic. The craze for ivermectin (the horse dewormer and favored MAHA remedy that sloughs off the intestinal lining to eliminate “parasites” that aren’t there) and Trump’s brutal, futile domestic ethnic cleansing campaigns are two expressions of this purging mechanism, demented, paranoid attempts to root out the (always invisible) trespassers sent by the System, destroying functional and healthy tissue in the process.

But there’s something really special about how gorging on proteins, saturated animal fats, and industrial wastes responds to these anxieties. I’ll call these the “densifying” mechanisms. My friend, a postal carrier, has a coworker who is always on about how “They” want you to eat fiber and drink water because “They say it’s good for you.” Eating protein will dam up your colon till you’re full of solid shit up to your diaphragm. Too much red meat (and alcohol) will cause the motherlode of uric acid in your blood to crystallize out as hard salts that accumulate painfully in the tiny capillaries of your hands and feet. Eating saturated fats will cause your arteries to harden (literally, atherosclerosis) with the buildup of fat plaque. The unconscious desire invested in the MAHA protein bacchanal is to densify and stop up and harden the body against the entropic dispersing forces of the System. If flows, and the channeling and damming of flows, are the form of unconscious desire, we might have to confront the fact that this state of deliriously self-righteous constipation is a desired one. You can’t, after all, put a boot (courtesy of the red, white, and blue or anyone else) up an ass that is packed with shit. Never, ever shitting, waging emotional war against your long-suffering wife for encouraging you to eat broccoli, developing debilitating cardiovascular disease, and ignominious early death are preferable outcomes to the alternative, dispersal into the System, merging with the flow, and losing your sense of the integrity of your body, the only thing you can be sure you really own. As I’ve said, I think this is indicative of a defective productive relationship between our notions of individual and System, and it could also be why these folks are so absolutely refractory to health and risk communication. Because conscious and unconscious desires don’t always (or even often) coincide, MAHA marketing magic is able to turn adherents’ bodies into appendages of the System (waste-valorizing and waste-processing machines) in a way that satisfies an unconscious desire for densification.