Lets read and discuss today’s article
WHEN DID MEAT BECOME RIGHT-WING?
10–12 minute read / 1665 words
In America, there are two famous vampires named Brian Johnson. Well, sort of. The first, who admittedly spells it “Bryan”, is the preternaturally ageless tech entrepreneur who charts his erections and uses infusions of his teenage son’s blood plasma in pursuit of eternal youth — and has ended up looking somewhere freakishly in between 38 and 80. The other resembles a man-beast with Neolithic coiffure, always baring a mahogany, bulging breast, often chomping on the still-beating heart of some poor animal or other. This Brian is better known by another name: Liver King.
This throbbing Johnson is the subject of a Netflix documentary released today; on the surface, he is a fitness influencer and food-supplement manufacturer. His myth, however, has outgrown these titles, and as such he has self-coronated as Liver King for his love of offal. He puts away around a pound of raw liver a day, coaching his fans (or “primals”) to slowly build up to his stomach-churning levels. His ethos, which he summarises as “Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?”, is a grotesque literalisation of the old “you are what you eat” mindset. Helped along by a “degree in biochemistry”, Johnson rationalises that you can subsume a beast’s masculinity by consuming its balls: “Vegetables don’t have the raw material required to produce a healthy set of testicles. Testicles do,” he tells GQ.
His extreme lifestyle has reaped rewards. He hawks supplements which bring in an annual income of more than $100 million, according to The Guardian; unfortunately, as fellow sovereign Tiger King could have told him, allowing a Netflix documentary crew into your compound risks gaining you a little more exposure than anticipated. Predictably, the film promises to rumble Johnson’s ruse: alongside all the Nosferatu nosh, he’s been shooting up steroids. Loads of them, costing $11,000 a month.
It’s a shame really, as my mouse had been hovering over the checkout button for a box of LK’s “nutritional food bars” on Amazon. Who wouldn’t want to look, as my farming-stock family would put it, like an “upright bull”? Besides, his promises are borderline magical: beef liver products are “nature’s most nutrient-dense food” and they also happen to “taste like dessert”. Looking at the reviews, the “dessert” in question must be “dog food”, “sawdust” or “gasoline” — but no pain, no gain.
While today’s documentary might spell the end of the Liver King food range, his ethos, and the sanguineous slab of the manosphere he represents, is going nowhere. The bro-ification of food is after all a fascinating new dimension to modern masculinity, which has seen anti-vaxxer and “make America healthy again” evangelist RFK Jr and his Right-wing disciples settle upon Big Burger as an agent of national decline. “We are betraying our children by letting [food] industries poison them,” Kennedy told a rally in November; “sugar is poison”, he clarified last month. He has a point: American food standards are notoriously lax, and emerging evidence on ultra-processed foods, staples of the American diet, does suggest a high health cost to conveyor belts of the cheap and tasty.
“The bro-ification of food is a fascinating new dimension to modern masculinity.”
Read the full article here:
WHEN DID MEAT BECOME RIGHT-WING?
10–12 minute read / 1665 words