Carnivore Women: the rise of the right-wing diet
An image you may or may not have seen: a smiling young woman holding a plate of raw, bloody meat up to the camera.
If you haven’t seen this particular phenomenon, then I envy you because for some reason these women have cropped up all over my social media timeline. They are the new spokespeople of the carnivore diet, whose participants consume meat, eggs and dairy exclusively. Some consume only meat.
These women claim that a carnivore diet has transformed their physical and emotional health, allegedly solving complaints like acne, inflammation and digestive issues… and people are listening to them. Instagram’s @elisekimberly1 has 120k followers, @missmeat has 125k, @animalbasedtaste_ 370k and @steakandbuttergal a staggering 538k.
These women are popular even in the face of a litany of medical studies suggesting that they’re wrong. The World Health Organisation states that there is “sufficient evidence” that processed meat is carcinogenic and classifies red meat as a “probable carcinogen,” meaning that some evidence suggests eating red meat increases risk of colorectal cancer. Red meat intake has also been linked to increased levels of C-Reactive Protein, an inflammation biomarker. The evidence on a potential meat-acne link is limited – but logic seems to suggest that if anything, meat consumption would increase acne rather than the other way round.
Culturally, meat has long been associated with masculinity. In nineteenth and early twentieth century working-class England, for example, meat was by-and-large reserved for the men of the household. In recent years, many of the most prominent advocates of the carnivore diet have been “manosphere” personalities. Joe Rogan extolled the diet on his podcast after being inspired to try it by Jordan Peterson. Peterson, in a viral video with Elon Musk, claims the diet as a cure-all, repeatedly and nonsensically encouraging Musk to try it for his back pain, to which a bewildered Musk insists that he “just needs surgery.” It is a difficult and rare feat to make Elon Musk look like the smartest person in the room, but here, Peterson accomplishes it.
So why have women started to fall down this particular rabbit hole?
Perhaps it is because meat’s association with masculinity has, of late, been matched (or even superseded) by its connection to the political right. As Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg argue, a combination of climate denialism and reactionary politics have made meat into an ideological symbol for Republicans. Their victim politics has them convinced that ‘Big Woke’ wants to steal their bacon and force-feed them tofu. Jim Pillen, elected Nebraska’s state governor in 2022 (and also, conveniently, heir to the Pillen Family Farms pork production company), ran his campaign on “stand[ing] up to radicals who want to use red tape and fake meat to put Nebraska out of business.”
In reality, of course, the picture is the reverse: lobbying efforts by European meat and dairy companies have successfully delayed and weakened climate legislation. In the US, livestock subsidies account for billions in public spending and meatpacking representatives are currently pushing Trump for sweeping deregulations of the livestock industry, which would worsen both its labour abuses and environmental impact. Even at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, meatpacking profits soared to historic levels; these are concentrated in the hands of Tyson, Cargill, JB and National Beef executives, whose companies control 80% of the market. Contrary to right-wing claims, animal agriculture continues to have a political chokehold over the West.
Cries of “soy globalism” espoused by white nationalists echo claims of anti-white racism and Great Replacement Theory, i.e. they are rooted in what Olga Khazan terms “the psychology of victimhood.” Framing your personality around meat, then claiming that an illusory “They” are taking it away from you fits into the narrative of persecution, which is increasingly used to radicalise people into right-wing movements across the West. In reaction to what is perceived as cultural collapse caused by the “enemies” – who are, in fact, villains created by the political and media classes (including but not limited to immigrants, trans people, and yes, even vegans) – a subset of people are increasingly clinging to nostalgic and nationalist fantasies of the past.
Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the rise of the trad wife movement. Trad wives eschew the workplace for an idealised past where a woman’s role was at the home as a wife and a mother. Trad wife Estee Williams, for example, claims that her lifestyle adheres to the Bible’s call for women to “serve and submit to” their husbands. As Sophie Elmhirst wryly comments, “for readers of Betty Friedan or viewers of Mad Men, the idea that the interior life of a mid-twentieth century housewife could be anything but tormented is strange, but the trad wives want to reclaim the role and show it as a source of pride and happiness.”
Both the trad wife movement and the carnivore diet commodify a perceived rebellion from the modern way of living, back to what they deem traditional values – after all, they argue, in the real America of the past, women were housewives and people ate meat. And sometimes, they overlap. Demonstrably, the pinned post on @missmeat’s Instagram is a video captioned “my political stance is whatever this is” with “this” being a montage of scenes of rural Christian America, interspersed, of course, with images of meat. Her political stance couldn’t be clearer.
Meanwhile, Isabella Ma (better known as @steakandbuttergal) states that her content doesn’t “touch the topic of politics”. But food is political. The US animal agriculture industry relies on grain which flows through trade markets. This encompasses cheap labour from immigrants and people of colour and a political system amenable to its manoeuvres even in light of its culpability in climate change.
Trad wives are not completely wrong in their suggestion that working 40 hour weeks is miserable and futile. The error lies in their analysis that this must be due to some inherent flaw of individual women rather than a universal feeling regardless of gender. Their solution is to take up the entirety of the housework, subjugate themselves to their husbands’ whims, and then market their lifestyle whilst faking its authenticity.
Similarly, many of the stories woven by women on the carnivore diet resonate with my own experience of endometriosis: inflammation and digestive issues
ignored by medical professionals and trying out a series of diets that don’t work. They have correctly identified that there is a problem with how we eat. But their solution – a hopped-up pseudoscience encouraging you to gorge yourself with meat and butter for likes from Republican men on Instagram – falls flat. I think I’ll stay over here with the rest of the tofu-eating wokerati, thank you.
