You Are What You Eat: Beef, Boy Kibble, and the Search for Manhood

—(Source Image: Al Drago—Getty Images) He sits shirtless, muscular, and shaggy, baseball hat turned backwards (of course) as he bites into a hunk of raw liver the size of a Shih Tzu.

Brian Johnson, known as the Liver King , consumes and advocates for a steady diet of raw organ meat to maintain an “ancestral lifestyle.” Johnson has millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok who tune in specifically for this content.

Johnson’s fans are not alone.

As economic anxiety reshapes American masculinity, a growing subculture of young and working-class men is turning to maxxing out their bodies as a way to reclaim value in a labor market that increasingly devalues physical work.

Working out isn’t enough.

It’s how they eat, dress, and sculpt—especially how they eat.

And their staple food isn’t expensive biohacker supplements; it’s ground beef, the cheap, protein-dense “boy kibble” endlessly promoted by fitness influencers.

The rise of carnivore aesthetics, lifting culture, and hyper-protein diets reflects a deeper crisis of identity among men who see the traditional beacons of secure manhood—having a well-paying job, owning their own home, being a dad—dimming before their eyes.

They’ve come to feel their bodies are one of the few forms of capital they still control.

And, perhaps most interestingly, this obsession is nothing new.

And, like the fads that came before, they’re following a path that is certain to leave them unfulfilled.

The history of America’s beef obsession The history of our obsession with beef and masculinity goes back at least 140 years.

In 1886, the great novelist Henry James published his novel The Bostonians , in which the unsympathetic Southern patriarch Basil Ransom thunders: “The whole generation is womanized, the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy.” Later, in 1909, Woods Hutchinson, a physician and health writer, wrote a bestselling book of health advice for young men, Instinct and Health , advising that men consume: “Meat! R-r-red meat, dr-r-ripping with b-l-lood, r-r-reeking of the shambles!” Then, as now, economic changes, fundamental shifts in family life, and evolving domestic relations all combined to make many young white American men feel anxious about their identity, and desperate to prove their masculinity in a world they perceived as increasingly sapping their virility.

The solution? Beef.