Why aren't there progressive carnivores?

 

Dwight calling me on my shit

    Okay yeah, I know, there are progressive carnivores. There's, like, me. And maybe three others I've found on Bluesky. We exist, I know, my title is hyperbole (clickbait? It's terrible clickbait if it is.). 

    But why are there so fucking few of us?! There's nothing logically contradictory about holding progressive socio-political values and following a carnivore diet. It's not like I'm trying to be a Stalinist who's working with Anonymous or something. 

    And yet, in the days following the thrice-cursed 2024 election, I watched carnivore communities I'd been hanging around in--typically very apolitical spaces--bursting with exuberant people gushing about having elected someone who platformed on dehumanizing my most beloved family members. That is not a fun experience. Did these people make their voting decision so they could strip my wife of her humanity, destroy my marriage, remove our healthcare options, and so much more? Probably not, at least not most of them. But they sure as shit voted for it. This isn't hurtful, my snowflake feelings aren't bruised--it is terrifying. 

    So why? Why are conservatives flocking to carnivore? Where are the progressives?

Something that probably isn't the issue--Vegans

Pictured above: our cultural bias.

    In the history of "narrative capture," where the right typically reigns supreme, the other exemplary here is the plant-based ownership of the progressive narrative. There's a moral code attached to it and everything. We all agree that the Standard American Diet is wretched and destroying our health. But in the progressive space, the only direction to go from here that follows the moral compass is plant-ward: mediterranean, ovo-lacto vegetarian, strict vegetarian, vegan, raw, etc. Low-carb is permissible if you can figure out how to do it while minimizing meat consumption. Carnivore is almost unthinkable. In this narrative, following a meat-based diet is bankrupt on every analysis--moral, environmental, health, social, etc. 

    I do not want to go deep on any of these, at least not right now.  I have a laundry list of why I think the actual arguments against meat-based diets are flawed, or too personal to be broadly applicable, but these are not the point I want to make here. I don't think the plant-based movement is a significant reason for the lack of progressive carnivores. I mean, the plant-based bias on the left certainly limits the progressive's exposure to arguments in favor of meat-based diets, typically outright shaming it. That'll have an effect, definitely. But people who get as far as going carnivore have already abandoned most social taboos about this (more on that below), so I'd say the actual candidates on the left for going carnivore probably aren't really that affected.

It's about authority

    So what the hell is going on? There's a pretty clear plant-based bias in our culture--certainly on the left, but it's the broad narrative from the health industry. It is genuinely believed without any reflection that you simply cannot survive without vegetables--this isn't questioned at all, and no evidence is ever offered in support. How does that result in there being so damned many conservatives who are carnivore? 

    Come along with me for a minute, won't you?

    Maybe this will come as a surprise, but most people who have entered the meat-based diet space didn't just wake up one day and say "You know what? I want to completely ignore every health message promoted by the healthcare industry and never eat a vegetable or piece of fruit again. Fuck those guys." Most of us--in fact, I'd venture to say every single one of us, got here because we've been utterly failed by the healthcare industry. We did what they said. We ate less and moved more. We ate the rainbow. We believed that "eating fat makes you fat." We sweated on treadmills, we calorie-restricted till we went into amenorrhea and started losing our hair, we ate low-fat cheese and drank low-fat milk and ate our 6-8 servings of "healthy grains." We went vegetarian. We went vegan. This often has a positive effect, at least initially. Our health would improve, and we often lost a bit of weight in the first few months. I mean, damn near any way of eating is better than the standard Pop-tart and Cheetos American Diet. But it never lasted, it always reversed. After some joyous initial success, we started to regain weight, despite continuing to stick to whatever regime we'd been on. Every damned day we gained more weight, restricted more, worked out harder, and lost ground. We became insulin-resistant, and were told that we need to lose weight (no shit?). We got shamed by our doctors, who told us we must be lying--either to them or to ourselves--about our desire to lose weight. We were told we must being doing it wrong, or not at all, because we are failing. We got shamed by our friends and family, who had been so impressed with our weight loss, who were now quietly judging us every time we took a bite of dessert because "Oh that must be why they're fat again." 

No. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.

Yes, I have some baggage here.

"The Big Fat Surprise"--Nina Teicholz

    So we tried every damned diet, eating plan, "lifestyle change" known to man and none of them worked. At some point, most of us had a friend, an acquaintance, a coworker, someone like that, who tried keto and had lost a bunch of weight. But we were smarter than that! We knew that keto might help you lose weight, but would give you a heart attack. It's full of "artery clogging saturated fats" and so much meat you will immediately contract colon cancer. No way were we falling for that! The American Heart Association is very clear on how important reducing saturated fats are and the need to eat fruit, vegetables, and fiber, or you will summarily die.

Here's a pic from the American Heart Association website--an organization where you can literally buy their endorsement of your food products without providing any evidence of their health effects.

    But those friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers weren't sallow-faced, exhausted, or miserable. They seemed to be healthier, more active, and more engaged. And, insult of all insults, they also weren't dying of heart attacks. Some of them were even crowing about their amazing lab results, their reduction in A1C scores, coming off of their diabetes medications, statins, and BP meds. Not all of them, for sure. But enough to make us onlookers start to wonder, maybe this is worth a shot. I mean, we've literally tried everything else. 

    And it worked. Motherfucker, it worked. You mean I could have been eating bacon this whole damned time? 

    I'm not going to go into the details for why it worked. I'm not going through the science, the arguments for why, or the biology that backs this up. It's all out there, if you want to find out, you can. I'm not an authority here, I'm an n =1. My numbers are great, my health is great, my weight is great, I'm active, I have energy, I am not in fact miserable without bread, and I keep an eye on things to make sure it's not all coming unglued. What I want to discuss now is anger.

Bro, why you mad?

    We trusted the authorities. We trusted our doctors to give us good information, that was evidence-based. We trusted the media (for some godforsaken reason) to report on health information accurately. We did what we were supposed to, we got fucked our whole lives, and shamed for it on top of it all.

Pictured above: me.

    But some of us on keto were still experiencing issues. We might have lost a lot of weight, and maybe slowed or even reversed some health conditions. But some of us hadn't really reached our goal weight. Some of us continued to have terrible digestive issues--IBS, GERD, the whole constellation of colitis options, chronic constipation, and so on. Some of us had skin issues--psoriasis, eczema, hives, etc. Do you seriously think at this point that we're likely to believe the healthcare industry when it tells us that the fix to this is to start eating bread again? Screw that, we decided to go hard. Fuck vegetables. Our healthcare industry insists that you absolutely must eat vegetables to be healthy. Given the healthcare industry's track record for nutrition advice, I'd say they are a reliable indicator for what not to do nutritionally. So we ignored it and went full meat-based. And miracle of miracles, we aren't dying, we are healthy, and for a lot of us, those last issues are resolving. Shocked. I'm shocked I say.

OMG lady, what is your point?!

    "Are you finished trauma-dumping yet? Do you have a point?" checks notes.... yes, and yes. I don't care if you're an ethical vegan, an amoral vegetarian, a hedonistic south beach dieter, or a carnivore in line for sainthood. I want you to understand the extreme level of anger that many of us have built up towards the nutritional authorities. We are Big Mad. But so what?

    Here is my working theory for why meat-based diets are overwhelmingly populated by conservatives: conservatives have lost most (or all) trust in authority, while progressives support systems of authority. 

    "But progressives are always fighting authority!" I hear you say. "Haven't you ever heard of Rage Against The Machine?" I am sure there are some for-real anarchists out there who are absolutely trying to burn it to the ground for the good of us all. But be real. For the vast majority of liberals and progressives, we aren't trying to burn it down, we're trying to fix it. Speaking for myself at least, I actually have a deep belief that human societies (of greater than, like, 300 people) function best with systems. I deeply believe that the authority of those systems should be derived from us, the people. I believe that is literally the point of that weird "government of the people, by the people, for the people" line in that old document people keep throwing around all the time. We want regulations to keep us safe, benefits for taxes spent, emergency services, universal education, roads and sidewalks, clean water and air, a functioning justice system (which we most certainly do not have right now). We want all the things that can only happen when we invest power in systems of authority. And the right does not. As a political position, they want to end nearly all of this and let "the market" (whatever that is) take over, because to them, our "systems" do not work and only serve as restrictions on our freedoms. 

    But consider, people who have gotten as far as being carnivore have--broadly speaking--been backstabbed over and over again by one of the basic systems in our world, healthcare. It's easy to see this fitting nicely into a world view of distrust--all of healthcare, all of government, all authority. It fits the narrative. I mean, the healthcare industry has point-blank fucked us over here, while posturing the whole time that they know what's best for us. To disagree is to be stupid or anti-science. That posturing is, not incidentally, very similar to the perception conservatives have of us liberals and progressives as paternalistic know-it-alls. All of these things come together in a clean package if you aren't willing to engage in some real subtlety. 

    And there is a lot of subtlety that needs to be engaged in here. I don't distrust all medicine, or all government. I think in general modern medicine is a goddamned miracle, and in principle our government should be how we function as a society to get things done on our behalf. But there are a lot of reasons to distrust modern medicine, and we can probably all list our favorites. Nutrition in particular is sort of a basic bitch nightmare for science. It's almost impossible to study effectively just due to its nature (so many confounders). If the study isn't likely to result in a drug of some kind, no one is going to bankroll it. What studies we do have are typically poor quality or observational, which don't lead to good conclusions. When we actually have high quality studies, they are either transparent shills for the food and drug industry, or they contradict each other. The media does a shit job of reporting on it, and EVERYONE in the nutrition space has an agenda.

    It all looks like a mess of conspiracy theories, with the big issue being that it really is that bad. And this fits the conservative narrative of the world far better than the progressive/liberal one. We on left roll our eyes at all of the conspiracy theories of the right. We believe in medicine. We believe in science. We've all seen that lawn sign. To believe in medicine is to believe in all medicine--you do what your doctor says because you're not a backwards uneducated idiot who thinks the water is turning our kids trans and your cancer will be cured if you take iodine supplements. As a group, liberal/progressives support systems of authority (at least in principle). As a group, conservatives distrust systems of authority (in fact and in principle). Carnivore plays to the anti-authority side, because right now the authority is fully against meat-based diets to the point of ridicule. And that's a real shame, cause it's improving some people's lives in immeasurable ways, and eroding the trust people had in their doctors and medical professionals. 

The downside

    So that's my working theory for why conservativism is rampant in the carnivore space. Yay. It does nothing to help me feel safer or happier there. Those people are still jubilant about an election result that may well destroy my family and my life. None of what I've said makes it okay. It just helps me think through it, figure out why I'd be okay with X but not Y or Z, and as a gut check that I'm not just on a slippery slope straight to totalitarianism. I don't think I am. I think it is actually possible to agree with some things and disagree with others, and to have good reasons for both. Even if I'm wrong, which I most certainly could be. So I'm gonna sit over here eating my steak and butter, mostly by myself, fending off well-meaning friends who think I'm killing myself, getting my labs done regularly cause n=1 of course, and see how it goes. If there are any other progressive carnivores out there who want to join me, I'd sincerely love it. It was nice to have a supportive space for awhile, I'd love to have one again. You know where to find me.