Food Is Not Magic

This is a web exclusive from our upcoming issue Why Be Healthy? In an age of health care and wellness industries and near-religious pursuit of fitness and self-optimization, this issue asks what it means to live well despite the limitations and frailties of our bodies, and what, beyond the scope of medicine, is needed for our flourishing.

“I believe it is far better for mankind to be struggling with new problems caused by abundance rather than with the old problem of famine.” —Norman Borlaug

When I first moved to a farm in the very center of New York, my nearest neighbor was a retired dairy farmer named Don. Old farmers are usually very mean or very kind, and it was my good fortune that Don was the latter. The first fall he showed up with a bowl of venison, the first winter he dug out my driveway with his tractor, and the first spring he plowed the ground that became the vegetable garden I’ve now planted with lettuce and squash for fifteen years. His kitchen table was covered with hunting magazines, a stack of which he would send home with me.

A widower, Don always had time to talk, and most of what I know about the small valley that holds my farm came from him. The single most striking thing he told me was that as a boy he had farmed with draft horses, that he remembered the first tractor to ever come onto his family’s land. Back then, they sold cream from a small dairy herd to a butter plant and raised pigs and grain. In the following decades Don grew his herd to over sixty, and like most farms in the area it came to rely on milk as its primary product. But technology continued to scale, and farm size followed. By the time Don sold his cows in the late nineties, it was clear that family farms with dozens of animals could not compete. In the lifetime of a single man, farming went from draft horses and hand milking to three-thousand-cow milk extraction factories.

The rapid industrialization of farming has had mixed consequences for the environment and animal welfare, and it has had overwhelmingly negative consequences for the health of rural communities. But for nonfarmers the most meaningful changes brought about by the increased efficiency of agriculture have been the creation of an unprecedented abundance of food and an unprecedented distance from its production; there’s sausage in the fridge, but no one knows how it gets made.

Couple profligate ignorance with the reality that food is one of the few human needs for which there can be no digital substitute, and the result is a collective psychodrama. In the online spaces that have come to define modern life, food has accrued a totemic significance, a capacity to shape bodies and minds and perhaps even souls. Thinkers from across the spectrum, from irony-drenched neoreactionaries to transhumanist tech millionaires, believe that to better ourselves and our societies we must better our food. At once divorced from the realities of farming and fixated on the visceral necessity of eating to sustain a human body, to them food has become not just sustenance but potential damnation and salvation.

A particularly loud group is the red meat reactionaries, of which Raw Egg Nationalist is the purest example. From behind an avatar of Silver Era bodybuilder Vince Gironda’s magnificent torso, this pseudonymous Twitter sage sees food as central to the globalist agenda. He foretells a future in which a consortium of environmental NGOs, agribusiness behemoths, and nanny states will mandate a diet of chemically laced, genetically altered corn and soy, a diet designed to emasculate both figuratively and literally. But if food can be a tool of control, it can also be a tool of rebellion. Eschew soy and seed oils, and instead gorge on meat, eggs, dairy, and perhaps some locally grown vegetables, and remake yourself entirely. He argues that eating steak will make you think radically different thoughts than eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes, and eating exclusively grass-fed beef and raw eggs for long enough will reform your very essence, imbuing you with a vital connection to your land and your people, and fostering a robust distrust of foreigners.

Photograph by Vidar Nordli Mathisen / Unsplash.

While Mr. Egg Nationalist primarily communicates through tweets, he has also written essays and books, which make his project clearer. At a frothy two hundred pages, The Eggs Benedict Option has all the heft of a soufflé. Despite its brevity, oddly washed out cover art, and stale pun of a title, the book is audacious in its scope, briskly dispensing with: the epoch-defining contest between nominalism and realism; the emerging hegemonic structures of control arising from a concerted effort to meld global government with consolidated corporate power; a history of agriculture from the dawn of humanity through the present day and its role in determining the structure of civilizations; the scientific basis for the healthfulness of various diets; the necessarily political implications of consuming soy; and a program of resistance by which the individual can use the dinner table to fight back against the aforementioned hegemonic structures, developing a gut microbiome powerful enough to oppose immigration from non-European countries.

In style and in substance, Bryan Johnson is the antithesis of Raw Egg Nationalist. A Silicon Valley millionaire whose waxen visage has the uncanny artifice of a plastic rose in full bloom, Johnson runs an organization called Don’t Die, a name which at least has the virtue of clarity. He is a particularly vocal example of the Twitter transhumanists, a cohort obsessed with documenting on social media every step of their attempts to achieve immortality. While food is by no means the only vehicle by which Johnson pursues this goal – he takes an evolving cocktail of drugs and supplements; he has been infused with his son’s blood, though he says he doesn’t do that anymore; he believes future technological advances will extend his life indefinitely – he does spend a great deal of time designing the optimal diet, the constituents of which include common health foods like blueberries and olive oil, as well more obscure substances like sunflower lecithin.

Johnson, unfortunately, has not done us the favor of organizing his thoughts into a book. He does have a website that catalogues his current protocol, beginning with his diet and then moving through exercise, supplements, and a dizzying array of biometric indices which he deploys in an attempt to prove that he has reversed the aging of his body. But for how long it is on the what of his pursuit, it is notably short on the why, and his writings elsewhere aren’t much help. In tens of thousands of words about “beyond first principles thinking” and a manifesto titled “A Plan for Humanity,” he rarely even attempts reflection on why he is so hellbent on achieving immortality, and in those rare times he does his mind seems to go blank. When the question is put to him directly in an interview on Prakhar Gupta’s YouTube channel, Johnson meanders around for a while before saying, “Like, literally the only thing I know is that I don’t want to die.” Clear, though also worryingly superficial for someone who seeks to upend all social order and is very uncertain about what will replace it and also what it means to be human. “If AI solves all problems, what will give us meaning?” he tweeted this past Palm Sunday. Followed several hours later by “If it makes you feel any better, almost everyone is experiencing emotional distress at any given moment, and they hide it from everyone.” And then, in the afternoon, “Need me to speak to your partner about their bad sleep hygiene?” At any rate, if lubricating his cells with oceans of high polyphenol olive oil might keep them humming for another day, then that’s what he’ll do.

Despite their differences, with the meaty reactionary on one heel of the horseshoe and the onanistically optimized vegan on the other, the two share an unrealistic obsession with food’s capacity to both harm and to heal. Bryan Johnson’s essential Cartesianism has him viewing his body as a foe that must be subjugated until the liberatory forces of science can allow his consciousness to transcend its frail limitations. (One path he sees to everlasting life is uploading his mind onto a computer: if we become the AI then it is less likely to see us as an enemy.) Because calories both sustain life and inflict some amount of damage, only sources of nutrition that can balance out their harm with a theoretical benefit should be consumed. The merits of each morsel of food must be weighed to the picogram. The modern food system is a minefield of cookies and oxidized fats, all threatening to shave precious minutes off of his life. To avoid these pitfalls, he consumes and sells food the superiority of which lab tests have proven to his satisfaction, whether it’s the antioxidant content of his blueberries or the flavanol concentration of his cocoa powder. When it comes to food his abiding obsession is proving to his own satisfaction that it will not harm him.

For Raw Egg Nationalist universal immortality is not the goal. Indeed, a sense of longing for the days when a man could make an honest living by swinging his axe into the heads of fleeing peasants suffuses his work. Even more than Johnson, he sees the food system as a threat to the men of the future, just as it weakened the men of the past. Barbarianism fell by the wayside, in his telling, primarily because of food; bands of hunters in which hierarchy was determined by personal charisma and prowess were crushed by the administratively hierarchical systems of labor, taxation, and control enabled by agriculture. But the ingredients produced by the modern food system pose a still graver threat. He worries that the globalist Planetary Health Diet, high in soy and other plant matter, low in meat (except for insects: “eating the bugs” is imaginatively central to the dystopian future) will increase rates of mental and physical illness while decreasing sexual dimorphism generally, and manliness in particular. This in turn will render the populace weaker, more malleable, and increasingly dependent on the state. Only the testosterone boosting effects of fat, cholesterol, and protein can counter these dire trends. Fight bureaucracy: slonk those eggs.

In the online worlds of red meat reactionaries and Twitter transhumanists, community, work, and the political process have become digitized abstractions, leaving food as one of the last universal and undeniable creaturely needs. But while food remains a tether that cannot be cut, that tether has thinned, as I suggested at the outset of this essay. All of us still need to eat, and we have endless options of what to eat, yet we are farther from the farm and garden than ever before. Food is the most obvious way the outside world intrudes on a hermetically constructed life, and so the obsession with purity makes sense. Food choices, what to eat and what not to eat, become a repository for both hopes and anxieties. The right diet might turn us into Ubermenschen, but the wrong one could make us all soyboys. The chocolate chip cookie might consign us to oblivion, but the very purest blueberries might be the gateway to eternal life.

The bright throughline of Raw Egg Nationalist’s work and that of the carnivore conservatives more broadly is a profound anxiety about the nature of masculinity. Because this is a shallow online movement, the positive alternative it proposes to the effeminate default is primarily aesthetic, consisting of oiled up muscles and ostentatious, confrontational transgressions. This embrace of hypermasculine stereotypes points to the superficial quality of the movement. For all the attempts at backfilling scientific and cultural reasons for embracing a meaty diet, the fact is that big, bloody, photogenic slabs of beef are the only food that have the right look. Raw Egg Nationalist’s theory that diet dictates politics is of course goofy; writing as a former vegetarian who now consumes roughly a steer’s worth of grass-fed beef every week, I can confidently say that eating lots of meat does not increase reactionary sympathies. That Durian Rider, one of the original vegan influencers, holds sexist views regressive enough to give Raw Egg Nationalist pause further bolsters the case.

The superficiality extends to analysis of how food gets to the dinner table. Both Raw Egg Nationalist’s writing and the online conversations of neoreactionary meatheads are rife with shoddy arguments about how to replace industrial agriculture with pasture-based livestock and backyard gardens. While there is nothing wrong with this vision (in some ways it is one I share) the disinterest in the staggering challenges, both logistical and cultural, of undertaking these changes suggests it is just another glossy veneer. Because a muscly lad ripping into a giant steak looks impressively virile, it must be possible to feed the populace on ribeye steaks. Or at least a numerically smaller but better populace.

The immortalists are strikingly similar. As much as they claim to simply be following the data, they repudiate human norms with a showy desperation. Besides posting endless lists of numbers purporting to prove he has conquered aging, Johnson regularly exhorts his followers to not do anything that might break their mechanical routines. Whether it’s having a glass of wine with an old friend or going dancing on Friday night, any departure from the plan is never worth the price. He has a penchant for posting pictures of himself in an anachronistic outfit of matching nightcap and pajamas, a candlestick held in his hand, with yellow-lensed glasses perched on his nose. “My routine doesn’t accommodate lunch or evening social dinners,” says Johnson, “which are a part of the fabric of human social bonds. But my loved ones have graciously accepted my explorations and they now find great satisfaction and humor in hearing how desperately I want to eat what they’re eating when we sit down for dinner.”

Technologically granted immortality could unravel society; eating in the obscene manner he’s decided helps his pursuit has already unravelled his social bonds. Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins, and Johnson’s profligate abstemiousness is a bizarre form of it, a sort of Silicon Valley asceticism bent on unification with an imminently arriving machine god.

Johnson speaks in a lilting and oddly robotic manner, with what looks like a deliberately fixed expression on his face. In photographs he has an unhealthy pallor, as if he’s a marble statue come to life or a cave dwelling creature forced out into the light. Presumably some of the strangeness is downstream from a real effort to never die, but taken as a whole the effect is that of a method actor who has gotten so lost in a role it has consumed him.

A strange amalgam of these two strains has congealed into the Make America Healthy Again movement, centered on the person of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. While Kennedy’s politics don’t align with Raw Egg Nationalist’s on most matters of substance, his broad diagnosis of the food system does. He proposes replacing the monocultures of industrial agriculture with regenerative farming, and he sees a malign combination of corporate influence and governmental agencies as responsible for the prevalence of chronic disease in America.

“The FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” he tweeted on October 25. “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”

As this quote suggests, for all its pining for simpler, more natural times, MAHA has more than a little of the Bryan Johnson optimizer about it. There is no coherent position besides a vague sense of mistrustful grievance that connects advocacy for stem cells, raw milk, psychedelics, and anthelmintics – a fact that does not trouble adherents to the movement. Even more than the carnivore conservatives or the Twitter transhumanists, MAHA is about vibes.

Without the pretense of a legible organizing ideology, Kennedy can embrace a hodgepodge of eclectic and often contradictory claims about the food system: food should be higher quality but also more widely available; the government should regulate some additives more rigorously, while loosening standards on others and on persecuted foods like raw milk; farmers should happily move away from the industrial practices they know for a more holistic approach, and they should make more money by doing so; the populace should be protected from weight loss drugs but also somehow attain radically improved health through diet, exercise, supplements, and alternative therapies. Its quintessence is an image of a smiling Kennedy preparing to eat a meal from Steak ’n Shake because the fries have been cooked in tallow instead of vegetable oil. It is worth noting is that these are not traditionally conservative talking points, and Kennedy himself is at once profoundly anti-institutional and eager to use the institutions of government to execute his vision.

Contradictions and superficiality do not discredit the claim that the modern food system is dysfunctional. Given the ever-increasing burden of chronic disease on the health care system and on the quality of the citizen’s lives, the only surprise should be that it has taken so long for food to become this much of a political issue. Because the resulting politics so often rest on ignorance about the realities of food production, complacency born of food security, and magical thinking about what makes foods good or bad, they make agriculture and diet subordinate to bespoke, largely online projects. But food, an irreducibly material necessity knit from seeds and soil and sunlight, cannot grant immortality, restore masculinity, or own the Libs, and attempts to enroll it in digital crusades diminish the real value it can provide.

Making actual improvements to diet and agriculture, rather than engaging in endless online wishcasting, requires engaging a reality that is literally on and in the ground. The first response to the food system we have should be immense, collective gratitude, foremost because we have plenty to eat. The Green Revolution, a process of rapid and radical improvements in agricultural efficiency that began in the mid-twentieth century and continues to today, had the laudable goal of ending famine. Its most prominent architect, the agronomist Norman Borlaug, sought to make food so abundant that no human would have to go hungry. His remarkably successful pursuit of this goal has had far reaching consequences, including the shift from family farms to corporate farms and corn and soy so cheap that they, in an endless variety of delicious and unhealthy formulations, make up most of the American diet. But for all the ills caused by the industrialization of agriculture, that it succeeded at preventing hundreds of millions of deaths and mass malnutrition is one of the great achievements of humanity.

Because of this, our second response should be humility. As we seek to fix the problems caused by the Green Revolution, problems such as lifestyle-related illnesses and dislocation from the land, we should take immense care not to break a system that, despite its flaws, nevertheless manages to consistently produce more than enough food for eight billion souls.

Our third response should be optimism. Efforts to improve our relationship to food can also improve our relationships with one another. By approaching food foremost as something we make and enjoy together, rather than a means to a baroque, unrealistic end, it can facilitate human connections that are both everyday and deeply rooted.

The fact that I am a farmer does not make me an authority on the optimal human diet or how best to reform agriculture in America. Quite the opposite, for the longer I farm, the less sure I am of how to answer such questions. But even as the broader prescriptions fade to illegibility in my mind, the specific prescriptions grow clearer. I look at my cows and sheep grazing on the hill, blots of soot and cotton on a field of green, and I’m confident that they are living as they should. I see my kids playing with friends on the steep bank where the stream winds out of the woods, with the benignly paternalist farm dog keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings, and I’m sure that farms should have kids and dogs. Instead of consuming Bryan Johnson’s overpriced cocoa powder in the delusional belief that it will extend my life, I make hot chocolate on a snowy day. Instead of eating steak in the hopes of dieting my way to a Raw Egg Nationalist ethnostate, I eat steak with friends because eating steak with friends is one of the best things to do on a warm spring evening.

This is why I suggest you make food, in the most basic sense of the word, whether that means cooking a special dinner, baking a loaf of bread, or cultivating a basil plant on your sunniest windowsill. Doing so will not grant you immortality or turn you into a warlord, but it will probably make you healthier, since the more you make your own food the less you will consume ultraprocessed garbage. If you buy from local farmers you will be making a modest but real contribution to a different sort of food system. More than anything I would like you to grow something. Whether you choose to raise a veggie garden or a flock of laying hens or a steer, patiently waiting for something that is not food to become food, with all of the challenges and joys the process entails, will let you know you are a living creature in a living world. Sharing the bounty with friends and family will let you know you are human.

Don, my old dairy farming neighbor, died more than a decade ago, but I sometimes wonder what he’d think of all this. A guy who avidly hunted deer, volunteered at the fire department, tossed around hay bales at eighty years old, and was also a remarkably patient and generous neighbor might be able to teach Raw Egg Nationalist something about manliness, and an old farmer well acquainted with the frailty of flesh might warn Bryan Johnson about the foolishness of chasing a materialist salvation. Probably he would shake his head and hold his tongue.