ANNALS OF GASTRONOMY RED SHIFT

Is an all-meat diet what nature intended?

- MANVIR SINGH

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.” He is the owner of Ancestral Supplements—which sells desiccated organ meat in capsule form— and a walking marketing campaign.

Within eight months, the Liver King had amassed a million and a half followers on Instagram and nearly three million on TikTok. He was mellow at first, but he embraced the new persona, growing crasser and more meme-worthy, and less clothed. (On a podcast in March, 2022, he said that the Liver King “broke out of his cage, and he fucking ate Brian Johnson.”) Most of his videos centered on eating meat, lifting heavy stuff, and doing punishing, unorthodox workouts. His body, he said, was all natural, the product not of steroids but of exercise and eating animals.

The Liver King’s premise, a familiar one by now, is that we are mismatched with the modern world and that many of our problems can be solved by reconnecting with long-lost ways. He insists on nine ancestral tenets. These include reasonable suggestions like “sleep,” “move,” and “bond,” but, as he once explained, “if I tell you all nine, you don’t remember anything.” Instead, he boiled his recommendations down to one: “I say, ‘Eat liver, because liver is king.’ ” The best-selling, stand-alone product on ancestralsupplements.com is Grassfed Beef Liver.