The Rarámuri believe God is hungry. Also known as the Tarahumara, the tribe is famous for endurance running in the Chihuahuan desert. They will pursue prey for days at a steady pace on sandals made of tire tread until the animal collapses. Hunting is prayer. God is fed by acts. Shared chores. Dance. Running. Meat is but one aspect of sustenance. I’d like to meet a Rarámuri and show him what I’m having for dinner tonight. I’m going to amble two blocks to the grocery store, pick up a pound of Butterball ground turkey for $5.99, smack it down on a skillet, and eat it out of an IKEA bowl. My God must be starving. As for me, I’m hitting my macros.

Turns out, men across the country are eating the exact same thing as me, so much so that the professionals who come up with names for pop-cultural phenomena have a moniker for this delicacy. “Boy kibble.” Damn, they’re good at their jobs. My dinner indeed is dry, loose, brown; masculine in its drab austerity and juvenile in its culinary depth. Throw it in a silver dog bowl and there’d be no questions. A fistful of rice. A vegetable. Season it, if you’re feeling frisky. The first time I cooked it, I was unaware I was participating in a trend. I thought I’d simply stumbled upon an innovation in bachelordom. Instead it was an answer to a collective national subconscious, urging us to forget pleasure and get jacked. 

Protein is everywhere these days. I don’t trust it. I assume it’s the government beefing us up for some doomed land invasion or a hiccup in the dairy industry resulting in vast stores of unused milk isolate in California. Either whey, what used to be a private practice of mine has gone public. For years, I ordered double chicken at Chipotle. On lucky days, crowded days, I’d get away with not paying for the extra scoop. Not so anymore. Chipotle now advertises, down to the .oz, the macros in what I used to call “The Big Boy Special,” a bowl with an extra heap of protein. Starbucks is hawking protein cold foam. Protein bars, needing a stunt to compete, have taken human names and now ask to be addressed as “David.”

I want no part in that corporate bullshit. We, the Boy Kibblers… hmm, that does not sound good. We, the Butterball Brotherhood, are fed up with being marketed to. We don’t want a colorful wrapper for some “chocolate”-coated rectangle of chalk called Fyül or Kyle, don’t want some dolled-up TV dinner of pre-cooked shredded chicken swimming in goopy sauce released from a plastic bladder. We want meat, we want it cheap, and we want it raw.

Mock me. Shame me. Tell me I ought to at least sprinkle some cheese on top. I don’t care. There’s nothing you can say that this gray slab of hissing chuck isn’t saying louder. I love my meat slop. I love my pack of pale, pink goo pushed through a rubber sphincter and pinched off by some anonymous machine and delivered by truck to the Polish grocery store down the street. I like to wolf down my boy kibble after a heavy lifting session, sitting at my Wayfair dining table by the wan light of my laptop screen, eating alone, watching someone else play video games. 

For decades, meat has been a temperature check on American masculinity. From 2012 to 2016, millennial masculinity sizzled flamboyantly in a bright-eyed age of techno-optimist abundance. Strips of bacon garnished smoky cocktails. BuzzFeed built a 100-layer-lasagna to the sky. Salt Bae gold-leafed wagyu. Timelines teemed with juicy burgers that would gladly secrete molten cheddar when their buns were gently pressed. On the other hand, I had a buddy on Soylent at the time. He got a concussion. He passed out and hit his head on the countertop on the way down because he’d put some banana slices on top of his Soylent which was already calibrated for maximum potassium and he got potassium poisoning and nearly died. 

Sobering years passed. Liver King emerged in 2021 like a wild-eyed prophet from the woods, portending doom. Bare-chested with a scraggly beard, flesh bulging like one of the ballooned organs he regularly devoured in front of his camera. A chimeric abomination of TikTok influencer and businessman, Liver King would rip into animal carcasses with his teeth in a bloody burlesque and speak directly into his mounted iPhone, extolling the virtues of “ancestral living.” It later came out he was injecting anabolic steroids. He apologized. 

These days, Liver King is an easily dismissed punchline, another ephemeral face briefly witnessed fighting to the surface of the algorithm’s slurry, then disappearing. But he was perhaps the clearest articulation of America’s collective hunger at the time: fame, influence, community, strength, and settling for the ersatz of each; infamy, followers, roids, a tripod. I remember seeing him on my screen once. I was sitting between sets on the leg press machine, watching him scarf down a heart. I laughed. 

Boy kibble, unlike a gold-encrusted steak or San Francisco’s latest psyop or eating roadkill for TikTok views, is sober, ascetic, nearly monastic in its presentation. It rejects corporate branding, refuses the tyrannical mandate that “dinner” be “pleasurable,” rejects the promises and temptations of pleasure altogether; the perfect response from a jaded generation of men living in a world where everyone has a high-quality camera in their pockets and no one owns a house; no kitchen to expand, no deck to build. What we do have is an audience. So we build muscle. 

What do these muscles do, you ask? Absolutely nothing. At least in my case I have the aesthetic pressures of cosmopolitan male homosexuality to point to. My straight brethren meanwhile are getting yoked just to complain on Instagram that their following is mostly gay men. These fellas will typically get into online coaching, charging their horny body dysmorphic audience for bespoke routines and meal plans, promising that they, too, can become Hercules. Maybe you’ve seen such men on your timeline. They speak baroquely of discipline and of maximizing your potential, but it’s basically OnlyFans by another name. If men wanted to appeal to women, they’d put down the kettlebells and get spiritually gayer.

We are T-Mobile salesmen and freelance contractors and the unemployed. None of us need to be built for war. But muscles are meaning-makers. They give men something to do, arrange our itineraries for us. We don’t hunt anymore. Our spare energy wants to go somewhere, build something. Used to be a man’s strength was affirmed by the faces of his village as he returned with a dead buck slung over his shoulder. Now it’s “looking huge, king.” The gym, a temple. Bodybuilders, our priestly class. It’s from their traditions that boy kibble arrived. Muscles only grow if fed: dedication, focus, attention. Give it up to these guys. If it was easy, everyone would do it. That’s what I love about the lifestyle. It’s punishing and the results are visible and it gives my otherwise flabby world structure.

Food becomes nutrition. Nutrition becomes math. Macros. An ounce of protein per pound of body weight. Scales get involved. Math does what math does; strips illusions. Colorful branded bullshit is replaced with ground beef and raw chicken cutlets. I can’t speak for my whole tribe, but me, personally, I’d rather inject unlabeled peptides directly into my veins than fall for another marketing campaign. Squeezable olive oil. Some pink sauce called “Slap Ya Granny!” Alpaca milk. 

Do I sound like a nihilist? I’m not. I’m a believer. I’ve never looked my dinner in the eyes before killing it, never watched the rapid rise and fall of a crumpled creature’s ribcage as it waited to die, never thanked it for its sacrifice. Still, my dinner is anointed with meaning. It’s a statement. It affirms my beliefs. I believe every living culture has a God, is a God, is a collective body. Like any body, it gets hungry. What you feed it is what it becomes. What it becomes is what you do. What you do is a form of prayer. How you pray is how you live. How you live is indistinguishable from what you are. My people have a saying expressing this idea: You are what you eat.