Me & the carnivores
Gruesome Details
I’ve been thinking a lot about food, about conservatives, about myself.
Conservatives practice a politics of opposition, as we know. If you like it, they hate it. They will gladly cut off their noses to spite their faces. They don’t mind, if they get to see you noseless alongside them. (Of course, there’s a class component to this. Not everyone is losing their nose, and those who keep their noses benefit from and stoke the reflexive hatred of the average conservative.) But I’m talking about people like me, who will soon be schnoz-less.
To a certain extent, I understand the impulse. My first arguably political thought was at five, when I discovered there had yet to be a “girl president.” I am as dismayed as anyone, at 36, to realize that there will, likely, never be a “girl president.” Such is the depth of America’s hatred of women. But the bulk of my political thought was built in opposition to two different but equally powerful conservative forces: George W. Bush and my aunt, Ellen.
I don’t speak to my aunt any longer. In 2016, I wrote her an email asking her to stop reading Breitbart. I sent her articles about their deep connections to avowed neo-Nazis. She, an apparently very dedicated reader, declined. I declined to break bread with her again, but what can you expect from a woman who, as a teen, campaigned for Goldwater?
The conservatism of George W. Bush overtook life in the aughts. The downstream effects of a culture set by purity-obsessed Christians will likely to be felt soon. Fox News hosts and conservative consultants are waiting, with bated breath, to begin calling women “sluts” again and have it mean something. But the conservatism of my aunt, and my opposition to it, was the stone on which I whet my own politic. My aunt, of course, subscribed me to the National Review for my thirteenth birthday. A gift every girl wants. I read it cover to cover, so I’m well aware of conservative positions. My antipathy for them is hard-won and well-reasoned. My aunt, in turn, never picked up any feminist texts. But, again, what can you expect from a Goldwater supporter?
This all brings me to the carnivores. I began my obsession with the carnivores during Trump’s first presidency. At the time, the carnivores were a niche subgroup, without a toehold in the future HHS. Carnivores, for the uninitiated, eat only what they call “animal-based foods.” This is meat, eggs, cheese, butter, and milk (preferably raw). They eat a lot of pork rinds. They dig into raw sticks of butter and try to recreate regular foods within their limited diet. They all use Redmond’s Real Salt, for some reason. Mikhalia Peterson, the daughter of Jordan Peterson, tried to brand it as the “lion diet.” But her ownership of it never really took off. (I have a video from 2021, if you’re interested.)
When I first became interested in them, they were micro-influencers. Each had a following on Instagram of less than 10K (Mikhalia excluded). Now my favorite carnivore, a woman in the Arizona suburbs named Laura Spath, boasts 142K followers on Instagram alone.
Those who first promoted the carnivore diet (as far as I could see) were women. They were drawn to the diet for various reasons, most of them related to weight loss or treatment for frequently self-diagnosed chronic illnesses. They were, by and large, white. They showed up to regular offices eating cold pieces of steak. They were anti-vaxx. They typically saw chiropractors as their main source of health advice. They uniformly voted for Trump and they all owned guns.
Today, the carnivore diet is much more mainstream. WebMD, Harvard Health, and the Cleveland Clinic all have articles on their websites about it. Their talking points (“seed oils are bad for you”) are being trumpeted by RFK Jr. They are ascendant in ways they likely only dreamed about when I first started tailing them online in 2017. They still see themselves as underdogs, however. They frequently post pictures of themselves with steaks, declaring “I’m eating enough to offset any vegans.”
The carnivore diet is a beautiful melange of America’s cultural obsessions: alternative health crazes, distrust of institutions, an individual approach to a larger problem, a desire to ignore reality. Carnivore-ism is a clear response to climate change. Carnivores yell frequently about veganism or how we’ll all be eating bugs someday. Climate change, to them, is background noise, a plot by some shadowy figure designed to pull them away from their beef patties.
My own conservative-tinged oppositional defiance disorder meant, after years of following the carnivores, I went vegan. Of course, I didn’t go vegan only because of the carnivores. But it certainly helped. My husband, a vegan of over a decade, was part of the pull. I make vegan meals almost every night and doing it full time no longer seemed scary or even challenging. As people died in meat packing plants during Covid and child labor started to be relied on by Perdue, I began my search to find the perfect vegan yogurt (Forager Vanilla Bean). If the carnivores were going to be political about their food, it was time for me to be political about mine.
(I skipped over vegetarianism entirely. I know enough vegans to have heard—and agreed with—arguments that vegetarianism is “bullshit.” I went vegan because of people. But, if I was going to do it, I might as well do it for the animals too. Cows would not be impregnated again and again to produce endless streams of milk in my name. I know even “free range eggs” are produced by chickens kept in environments so cruel that they end up killing one another to create more room for themselves.)
As the carnivores rise to even more dizzying heights, I cannot help but wonder how their politics will evolve in the coming years. The major carnivores are not wealthy. They obtain their meat from Costco or order burger patties ala carte from McDonald’s. They go to Buffalo Wild Wings and force co-workers to make trips to Fogo de Chao. The effects of the deregulation of the American food system will have an immediate and, likely, severe impact on the food they eat. They will feel the result of their votes, with their refusal to eat vegetables, before I do.
I would hope these effects make them realize the hollowness of their own politics. But I’ve read enough National Review to know they will likely retreat even further into their own self-created realities. They will create easily vanquished boogeymen. Somehow, tainted meat will become the fault of vegans or environmentalists or Bill Gates.
As I was discussing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with my mother last week, she said to me, “Well, America does have a worse food system than Europe.” I told her, as I will tell you: this is not true. Our food standards differ. Ours are better in some ways, theirs are better in others. We may dream there is a socialist utopia across the sea, but Europe is subject to the same oligarchic control as we are in the United States. Nestle sees no borders. European food labels may only appear to have fewer ingredients than those in the United States. We, actually, require more granular food labeling than our European counterparts who can register E 415 instead of “xanthan gum” on their nutritional breakdowns. Everything is a matter of perspective and things aren’t as simple as they may seem (or as we want them to be).
As a committed consumer of right wing propaganda, it seems necessary to once again point out how much of it we are swimming in. As Naomi Klein says in Doppelganger, a book I cannot recommend enough, conservatives take even valid concerns and twist them to their own needs. “Seed oils are bad” feels correct. And, in some ways, it speaks to a larger truth about corn subsidies for farmers and how we, as a country, are drowning in high-fructose corn syrup in order to keep corn producers happy. But the sentence is false. Seed oils are fine.
It is important, as we continue into conservative control of our government and our culture, to take on some of their oppositional spirit. It is important to believe things not because they “feel true” but because they are true. It is important to create inside yourself a politics that isn’t hollow, because a hollow politics will lead you down dark corridors. I mean, there’s a woman online who eats sticks of butter. If that’s not darkness, I don’t know what is.
If you are a carnivore reading this, let me be your Eve. Apples are delicious and I think you’d be happier if you ate even a single one.