The hyper-carnivory movement conjures a time when men hunted and lunch was literally on the hoof. What does the research say?
“Meatfluencers” like the Liver King sell the premise that our problems can be solved by reconnecting with long-lost ways.In August, 2021, a new, shirtless figure appeared on Instagram and TikTok. With a great shaggy beard and muscles the approximate size and color of ripe pumpkins, he was part cowboy, part Conan the Barbarian. “I’m Brian Johnson,” he said in his third Instagram video. “My family and tribe call me Liver King.
“Forget the leaves and fibrous tubers, we’re going hunting!” Paul Saladino writes in “The Carnivore Code,” the closest thing the new movement has to a manifesto. He asserts that “this approach appears to bewhat our ancestors did.” According to “The Carnivore Code,” plants are poison—they don’t want to be eaten, and have, as a result, evolved defensive chemicals designed to disrupt your digestion.
The meeting also revealed problems with the meat-centric story. Dart had asserted that “all prehistoric men and the most primitive of living human beings are hunters, i.e., flesh eaters.” But contributors to “Man the Hunter” showed how one-sided this perspective was. The anthropologist Richard Lee reported that the !Kung, one of the so-called Bushman people of Southern Africa, got two-thirds of their calories from plants. Nor were they an exception.
Some meatfluencers stress that human beings are animals and maintain that, if allowed to eat according to our animal instincts, we will favor a meaty menu. But the biologists David Raubenheimer and Stephen J. Simpson have been investigating animal alimentation for more than thirty years, and their new book, “Eat Like the Animals,” suggests that the meatfluencers have it all wrong. The authors started collaborating at Oxford, studying the eating preferences of locusts .
Is it possible that the meatfluencers are only a muscly manifestation of a larger awareness—that our food system is failing us? In “Eating to Extinction,” Dan Saladino, who’s no relation to the carnivore Paul, urges readers to “consider what the past can teach us about how to inhabit the world now and in the future.
How do members of the carnivore crew respond? Some, like Judy Cho and Paul Saladino, argue that the consensus is wrong and that, as Cho says, “cows may be the way to save the planet.” They blame environmental devastation on such factors as grain monocultures and crop-driven deforestation—never mind that some eighty per cent of farmland is used for livestock feed. Others take up a vaporously ideological form of opposition.
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