Across the far right, a paranoid prophecy has been taking hold: the belief that globalist elites want to take meat off the menu and replace it with insects. The charge has been spouted in one version or another by provocateurs like Tucker Carlson, Mike Cernovich, and Jordan Peterson, and repeated by countless accounts on social media.
The claim has found its way into the sloganeering of major right-wing political parties around the world, from the Conservative Party of Canada to Lega in Italy, and the Law and Justice party in Poland. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis invoked the specter of insect-eating when he banned the production and sale of cultivated meat in his state.
These claims frequently accompany advocacy for meat-heavy, protein-packed diets — ascendant within the so-called manosphere and across the right more broadly — that ostensibly hearken back to our Paleolithic ancestors, who, the thinking goes, dined on freshly-hunted prey instead of the processed slop churned out by our modern food system. Jordan Peterson, for instance, is a vocal proponent of an all-meat carnivore diet, which he compares favorably to the diets of hunter-gatherers and contrasts to contemporary diets he suggests have too many carbohydrates. “Maybe human beings should be in hunting mode all the time,” he said in 2022.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate widely divergent diets shaped by climate, geography, and availability. And while they certainly ate meat, they had no guarantee of successful hunts and scant means of preserving fresh kills. In fact, according to a recent paper in the journal Science Advances, that presents a peculiar twist: Putrefying meat attracted flies, which laid eggs that hatched into maggots, which in turn probably provided a ready source of protein to early hunters.
Ironically, then, part of the Paleolithic diet likely was bugs.
Carnivore influencers misunderstand not just where ancient humans got their animal protein, but also how much of it they ate. In The Meat Question, a sprawling history of humans’ relationship to meat, anthropologist Josh Berson writes: “if anything, it is ‘modern’ urban populations, particularly in the United States, that exhibit specialization for animal consumption — not the foragers so often held up as models of a meat-eating subsistence strategy.”
In other words, those who suggest that we’ve fallen from pre-modern meat-eating übermen to plant-gnawing and bug-curious untermen have their history backward. It was only with the advent of modern factory farming that meat became so reliable and ubiquitous that Americans can now eat it three times a day.
Read more Vox coverage of the science, culture, and politics of meat
Myths about how we used to eat and, perhaps, should eat again, matter politically now more than ever. The image of prehistoric man the hunter looms over contemporary “gastro-politics,” reflecting pervasive social and political anxieties about the food we eat. The Make America Healthy Again movement has been buoyed by a growing cultural obsession with carnivore and paleo diets and protein — entrails, tallow, and marrow are all chic; there are calls to double down on meat in federal nutrition guidelines. All of it dovetails with a romanticization of “natural” pre-modern food system and a distrust of all things “industrial” and “ultra-processed.”
And it’s hardly just a right-wing phenomenon. The use of Paleolithic humans as dietary role models isn’t so different from mainstream foodie mantras about ancestral diets like author Michael Pollan’s famous advice: “Don’t eat anything your great-great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” More recently, Pollan has fretted that the environmental benefits of meat alternatives may be offset by vague concerns about the health and safety of their “21 ingredients or whatever.”
This sort of bias toward the traditional can sometimes result in what we might term “foodie horseshoe theory”: For instance, in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan, a liberal Berkeley professor, idealizes the small-scale livestock rancher Joel Salatin, an anti-government agrarian who appears on carnivore diet advocate Jordan Peterson’s podcast to attack veganism, “globalists,” and processed food alike.
For both left and right, myths about a romanticized past bolster present-day identities, politics, and eating habits while shielding them from debate about the food future we ought to create. Of the many problems with the modern food system, a paucity of meat is not one; research on food’s environmental impacts points us toward the need to massively reduce meat consumption. But tackling that problem, and many others, means we first need to abandon myths rooted in bad history.
What even was the prehistoric diet?
Writing in Scientific American in 2017, in the midst of the paleo diet craze, renowned paleontologist Peter Ungar challenged not just the diet itself but its very epistemological foundations. “What was the ancestral human diet? The question itself makes no sense,” he wrote. What most distinguishes the human diet is its incredible adaptability across time and space. Our ancestors have, over the millennia, adapted to eating what was available in whatever quantities it was available. As Ungar noted, that can mean diets made up of almost entirely animal flesh and fat, or one consisting of mostly roots, tubers, and fruit. Trying to pin down a single “Paleolithic” or “ancestral” diet is impossible.
While the idea of Paleolithic eating summons images of humans as “hypercarnivores,” or apex predators, humans are not naturally obligate carnivores like big cats. We are omnivores, capable of deriving nutrients from a vast variety of plant and animal sources. The role that meat played in our evolution, how much of it we ate, and how we got it (theories of scavenging carrion abound alongside those of near-constant hunting), remains the subject of vigorous debate among scholars, with plausible estimates, depending on the population, time period, and ecological context, ranging from very little to quite a bit.
What was the ancestral human diet? The question itself makes no sense.
— PETER UNGAR
Reconstructing ancient dietary patterns and quantities from scant fossilized remains, much less generalizing based on them, is fraught detective work. It sometimes involves, quite literally, sifting through the trash of ancient peoples. Animal bones with damage from fire, teeth, and butchering, for instance, can confirm animals were eaten, although it is difficult to determine frequency and quantity. While modern discussions of Paleolithic diets center on meat from a small number of livestock species farmed and eaten today, our ancestors ate a wide range of creatures, many now extinct or no longer used for food; the archeological record shows that rats, for example, were probably paleo-compliant.
Genomic and proteomic (protein) analyses of fossilized material can also help shed light on ancient diets, and the chemical composition of human bones offers additional clues. The notion among some scholars that early humans ate a superabundance of meat comes not just from ideas about their hunting habits gleaned from the fossil record, but also from high levels of stable nitrogen isotopes in fossilized skeletons, which can suggest high consumption of offal. But science progresses on proposing and testing alternative explanations, and researchers have more recently suggested plants — and, now, maggots — as a source of all that nitrogen. The latter suggestion, put forth in the new Science Advances paper, is rooted in the theory that meat, a relatively scarce resource, would be kept around even as it rotted — not just to be eaten, but also to allow maggots to hatch to provide a steady source of fresh, bite-size protein.
Of course, much of this is educated guesswork. Thus, many theories about ancestral diets are also supplemented with evidence from the eating habits of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, who act as empirically studiable stand-ins for long-gone ancestors. Ungar, for instance, contrasts the largely carnivorous fare of Alaska’s Tikiġaġmiut people with the plant-rich diets of the Gwi San people of the Kalahari. The authors of the Science Advances paper back up their archaeological sleuthing with historical reports of 19th-century Arctic and subarctic hunter-gatherer societies eating maggots growing in stored animal carcasses. Both the fossil and ethnohistorical records, they conclude, reveal early human populations not as hypercarnivores but as omnivorous opportunists.
The closer we come to contemporary society, the more we know with greater certainty about what our ancestors ate. And here, too, the historical record fails to support ideas of persistent carnivory. If anything, the domestication of livestock, which first began to appear in the archaeological record 12,000 years ago, likely diminished meat’s role in human diets: Through millennia, farmed animals were often more valuable alive than dead, as a source of milk, wool, labor, and fertilizer, and as a store of wealth.
In medieval Europe, butchering pigs was a highly seasonal ritual, sometimes reserved for special occasions; in Imperial China, pigs were a symbol of prosperity; throughout much of South Asia, cattle regularly supplied dairy and manure, but beef consumption was forbidden. Far from being a dietary staple, meat’s role was fluid: by turns a sacred offering, a show of wealth, or a winter fallback. And in most cases, meat intake remained relatively low, at least by modern standards, until the very recent past.
It wasn’t until around the turn of the 20th century that animal agriculture was industrialized. The adoption of assembly-line systems in slaughterhouses allowed for economies-of-scale killing of animals and standardization of cuts of meat, while selective breeding practices dramatically enhanced livestock productivity. As historian William Cronon has shown, these advances, coupled with new technology like refrigerated rail cars and canning, quickly turned meat into a ubiquitous commodity. As crop agriculture also industrialized, animal feed became cheap, allowing for the advent of factory farms where animals like pigs and chickens were raised indoors for their entire lives and bred to grow to slaughter weight rapidly.
These extremely recent changes remade humanity’s relationship to meat. Over the past century, the entire agricultural value chain has been redesigned to feed, raise, and kill animals on an ever-greater scale. In 1909, just over 150 million chickens were sold for slaughter in the US. By 1949, that number was close to 600 million. In 2024, it was 9.5 billion. Over the past half-century, American meat production has increased almost threefold and global meat production fivefold, a transformation that geographer Tony Weis has called the “meatification” of our food system.
Modern humans, as much as our Paleolithic ancestors, as much as our great-great-grandparents, adapt our diets to our surroundings. And surrounded by ever-greater quantities of cheap meat, we ate more of it.
Can we please be serious about food policy?
Modern diets are fraught with anxiety, and with good reason. There is much about modernity and the modern food system to be anxious about, from its contribution to global climate change to the potential health impacts of some food additives.
These are real problems, of course, but an anxious frame rooted in hyperbole, cliche, and nostalgia for free-grazing pigs doesn’t offer a clear perspective on what’s needed to address them. Instead, it serves up simplistic answers, like a wholesale rejection of modernity. But, ironically, hostility toward modern food technology and an effective regulatory state, whether by the foodie gurus, carnivore podcasters, MAHA, raw milk enthusiasts, or DOGE cost-cutters, might very well increase the quantity of rotting meat (and perhaps maggots) in our food, a problem in 19th-century America before the creation of the FDA and the widespread adoption of food refrigeration and preservation technologies.
Consider that the modern food system is, on balance, a great thing. Diseases of malnutrition like pellagra and rickets have been banished to the past, as have the dangers of eating contaminated, toxic, spoiled, or adulterated foods. It is only because food is more abundant, affordable, and safe than at any other time in human history that we can spare any attention to the chronic, long-term problems to which modern diets contribute, like obesity and diabetes.
Addressing those problems means embracing modernity rather than rejecting it. It requires actually engaging with the complexity of the food system, and facing up to a few uncomfortable truths, like the fact that it is meat in particular, and not food generally, that drives many of the food system’s harms. But in the face of complexity, a retreat to an unspoiled past offers both an escapist fantasy free of difficult tradeoffs and a handy justification for our worst dietary choices.
In an imagined past, meat consumption acts as a potent political signifier that binds us to our tribe. And food becomes a theater for performing politics and identity. For foodies who sneer at “industrial food,” going back to small farms and eating supposedly “better” organic and regeneratively farmed meat may signal a commitment to personal health and environmental justice that is simply not borne out by science. On the right, the embrace of meat anchors a particular vision of politics — and masculinity — that is fundamentally anti-modern, anti-liberal, and anti-“woke.” And so the modern food system (junk), liberal men (soy boys), and scientists and experts (globalists) can all be framed as an assault on a fundamental and personal bodily practice.
But rather than a transgressive return to a lost past, meat-heavy diets not only represent the status quo but also rely entirely on the modern food system and its globe-spanning networks of exchange, cutting-edge logistics and infrastructure, highly capitalized multinational corporations, and sophisticated biotechnologies. Close factory farms and industrialized cattle feedlots, and 99 percent of chicken, 98 percent of pork, and 75 percent of beef in the US disappear overnight, making mass-scale carnivory impossible.
As is often the case with myths, those about ancestral diets are more about the anxieties and identities of their purveyors than it is about a real past or even a real present.
Paradoxically, then, those who champion pre-modern diets can do so only because of the amenities and technologies of the modern world. At no other point in human history could someone opt for the meat of their choice for three meals every day, without getting any blood on their own hands, and then post about it on social media to claim they are living like their ancestors. If anything, the myth of meat’s transhistorical importance masks the fact that the meatiness of current diets is a historical flash in the pan, the result of a food system focused on overproducing meat, not an evolved set of inherent needs or preferences.
As is often the case with myths, those about Paleolithic, ancestral, and great-great-grandmotherly diets are more about the anxieties and identities of their purveyors than it is about a real past or even a real present. The very image of the primitive prehistoric hunter is less careful archeology and ethnography than it is a product of modern misconceptions about human evolution mixed with popular culture pastiche, which makes self-styled primitivism quintessentially post-modern, as if the “this is what they took from us” meme was slapped over a picture of Fred Flintstone eating dinosaur ribs.
History shows us that there is no single way humans have eaten and no predetermined way we should eat. Diets are a product of the world we live in. And in that world, the questions we should be asking are not about what our ancestors ate — and whether we should therefore eat meat, berries, or maggots — but about what rational decisions we can make about our future. That includes asking why meat is so cheap and easy to buy, and whether it ought to remain so. The answers lie in science, public health, and political economy, and not in myths. The diets of the long dead are a red herring at best, red meat for reactionary politics at worst.
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