Welcome to You Are What You Eat...or Are You?, a mini series about the ways that we project our identities through food.
One of the most popular memes on the r/RawMeat subreddit depicts Jesus sucking a long, anxious drag on a freshly lit cigarette. "God watching us set meat on fire after creating it as the perfect fuel for humans," reads the caption. Is the oven sacrilegious? That's the foundational principle of this community. Modern diets have been corrupted by an elusive cabal of global industrialists—Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, Big…Beyond Burger?—and the only way to live in accordance with nature, as God intended, is to chow down on a veiny slab of uncooked beef.
The denizens of r/RawMeat seem to skew young and male, and their forum unfurls like a pamphlet for a profound new epicurean crusade. One post showcases a dinner of slimy minced liver; another derisively refers to those who prepare their meals as "food burners." Men have flitted through countless different questionable nutritional movements and fitness motifs to crack the code of peak performance. But after the dust has settled, and the drums of whey protein have been cast aside, these guys decided that the truth was writhing right in front of them the whole time.
"I wouldn't call myself a conspiracy theorist, but I don't trust everything," says Alex, a 19-year-old from Sweden who is a frequent poster on r/RawMeat and withholds his last name for "safety purposes." Alex pivoted to a raw diet last year. "Just think about it: If everyone was healthy and in good shape, why would we need hospitals? Medicine? Healthcare?"
It's difficult to know how large the raw meat community is. I'm certainly not the only person who's slurped down a gristly cube of horse sashimi during a trip to Japan. (Grassy and gamey. Not bad, honestly.) And beef tartare can be found in any millennial-courting French bistro in the country. But the boys of the subreddit are far more fanatical about their allegiance to the diet than us casual participants. R/RawMeat has about 1,600 subscribers, and new posts go up once every couple of days. Most of them reiterate the dogma that uncooked food is better for our bodies and our brains; that untempered animal blood makes us strong, virile, and free of disease; and that mainstream dietary philosophy, which espouses basic food hygienics, is thoroughly wrongheaded. One must open their third eye to indulge in the raw meat lifestyle. After that, who knows what you might see.
"I suffer from pretty severe anxiety and depression. Whenever I eat a lot of raw food in my diet, that decreases. I get much more content with my life and focus," adds Alex. (It's worth noting here that no formal nutritional studies or professional dietary advice have revealed or advocated a relationship between eating more raw meat and feeling smarter, stronger, happier, or healthier.)
Immerse yourself in the community, and you will witness all sorts of eccentric epicurean choices. Mostly we are talking beef; raw poultry or pork isn't nearly as popular. Sometimes the adherents chow into something relatively conservative—like, say, an uncooked skirt steak—while other times, the cuts for dinner time are far more esoteric. Fully unvaccinated beef, for instance.
The avatar of the discipline is probably Brian Johnson, better known as The Liver King, who has amassed over three million TikTok followers who watch him feast on wet, sinewy organ meat every day. He claims the diet has granted him his incredible physique, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he also believes that a correlation lies between carnivorousness and masculinity. In a recent GQ profile, The Liver King speaks openly about the enfeebling of the American male; how the red-hot lifeblood of the sex has been leached out through dating apps and polo shirts. "I'm concerned we have a soft man problem," he says. For centuries, fad diets have preyed on those who've been brutalized by feminine beauty standards, and Johnson is breaking tradition with an ascetic set of rules designed to innervate a more masculine insecurity. Can meek boys be vitalized by raw offal? I suppose that is a starting point, if you have otherwise run out of options.
"I don't think a lot of females are into raw meat. … Most girls these days just want to follow what their friends do and eat junk," says Alex, when I ask him why he thinks there isn't an abundance of women within this cadre of meat eaters. "I think a lot of why people seek out this community is because they're already edgy and don't belong to society, and always felt like something is wrong. Usually those people will be dudes."
I should probably make it clear that raw meat is an extremely risky thing to eat. The subreddit is dotted with horror stories of consumers suffering from dizziness, gastrointestinal difficulties, and stomach aches. "Whenever I eat raw liver, within two hours, serial diarrhea starts," reads one recent post. Nutritionists and medical professionals generally discourage people from eating raw red meat, because untreated, unprepared flesh carries a bevy of parasites and bacteria. (Salmonella, Listeria, and E. coli to name a few.) The idea that our ancient ancestors relied entirely on a raw diet is similarly suspect. Human beings started cooking food, including meat, one million years ago, at the apex of the ice age. Burning food is not a godless, nouveau sin. It's just another boring appendage of society.
Still, the diehards believe anyone can avoid these sanitary pitfalls so long as they know what they're doing. Scott Hall, a 21-year old in Missouri who says he works at DoorDash, told me a number of people "don't even follow the diet properly," which "causes a lot of problems." Alex admits that unprepared meat can be hard on his stomach, but he lays the blame on "toxic vaccines, antibiotics, and man-made hormones," which, he claims, rots the nutrition at its core. By and large, the community has found common ground in a deep skepticism and distrust for authority and mainstream medical accounting. The diet is just the tip of the iceberg, guarding a whole canon of paranoid conspiracy theories. It's a tale as old as the internet.
The people I spoke to for this story are certainly not wrong to believe that factory livestock production is cruel, unhealthy, and out of step with the circle of life. That belief is also a fulcrum of the organic movement, the vegan movement, and many advocates of regenerative agriculture. More Americans should question the mechanics of the food supply. The many faulty conclusions of the r/RawMeat community just reveal what happens when meat industry ethics collide with a harebrained macho fantasy.
The raw meat diet may continue to be demystified in further research, and the lifestyle might lose some of its onerous, hypermasculine baggage. I would personally love to live in a world where a type of food could simply be good for you without compulsive participation in some sort of reactionary, Joe Rogan-ish cult. Until then, the raw meat boys will see themselves as outsiders, and outsiders breed deviance. When your whole lifestyle embodies the idea that you’re marginalized by the mainstream, it breeds righteousness, too. "Most people have never met someone else on the diet so I am focused on developing connections with people who are willing to relocate in order to live with or near other people on the diet so we can start working on the beginning stages of starting an intentional farming community," says Hall. All of us food burners are on notice.