In America, there are two famous vampires named Brian Johnson. Well, sort of. The first, who admittedly spells it “Bryan”, is the preternaturally ageless tech entrepreneur who charts his erections and uses infusions of his teenage son’s blood plasma in pursuit of eternal youth — and has ended up looking somewhere freakishly in between 38 and 80. The other resembles a man-beast with Neolithic coiffure, always baring a mahogany, bulging breast, often chomping on the still-beating heart of some poor animal or other. This Brian is better known by another name: Liver King.
This throbbing Johnson is the subject of a Netflix documentary released today; on the surface, he is a fitness influencer and food-supplement manufacturer. His myth, however, has outgrown these titles, and as such he has self-coronated as Liver King for his love of offal. He puts away around a pound of raw liver a day, coaching his fans (or “primals”) to slowly build up to his stomach-churning levels. His ethos, which he summarises as “Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?”, is a grotesque literalisation of the old “you are what you eat” mindset. Helped along by a “degree in biochemistry”, Johnson rationalises that you can subsume a beast’s masculinity by consuming its balls: “Vegetables don’t have the raw material required to produce a healthy set of testicles. Testicles do,” he tells GQ.
His extreme lifestyle has reaped rewards. He hawks supplements which bring in an annual income of more than $100 million, according to The Guardian; unfortunately, as fellow sovereign Tiger King could have told him, allowing a Netflix documentary crew into your compound risks gaining you a little more exposure than anticipated. Predictably, the film promises to rumble Johnson’s ruse: alongside all the Nosferatu nosh, he’s been shooting up steroids. Loads of them, costing $11,000 a month.
It’s a shame really, as my mouse had been hovering over the checkout button for a box of LK’s “nutritional food bars” on Amazon. Who wouldn’t want to look, as my farming-stock family would put it, like an “upright bull”? Besides, his promises are borderline magical: beef liver products are “nature’s most nutrient-dense food” and they also happen to “taste like dessert”. Looking at the reviews, the “dessert” in question must be “dog food”, “sawdust” or “gasoline” — but no pain, no gain.
While today’s documentary might spell the end of the Liver King food range, his ethos, and the sanguineous slab of the manosphere he represents, is going nowhere. The bro-ification of food is after all a fascinating new dimension to modern masculinity, which has seen anti-vaxxer and “make America healthy again” evangelist RFK Jr and his Right-wing disciples settle upon Big Burger as an agent of national decline. “We are betraying our children by letting [food] industries poison them,” Kennedy told a rally in November; “sugar is poison”, he clarified last month. He has a point: American food standards are notoriously lax, and emerging evidence on ultra-processed foods, staples of the American diet, does suggest a high health cost to conveyor belts of the cheap and tasty.
“The bro-ification of food is a fascinating new dimension to modern masculinity.”
In response, masculinity influencers have become crusaders against what they perceive as the worst culprits, with varying degrees of evidence: seed oils, pasteurised milk and “feminising” soya milk, tipple of the breasted and much-detested soyboy, have all been in the firing line in recent years. But beyond semi-rational health concerns a much stranger and more ancient logic is at play.
At one point in the Netflix documentary, Johnson has his reluctant sons pluck fresh organs from a dying bull and devour them. It is a deliberate display of cruelty and domination, with a ritual component that reminded me of an episode of the podcast Agent Palehorse, about an undercover FBI agent compelled to participate in the drinking of a goat’s blood after it has been inexpertly felled by neo-Nazis on hallucinogens. That episode, which describes the cup of coagulated gore being passed around, imbibed and sometimes vomited out, crystallises the point of all this killing and swilling: it is meant to be an ordeal, a test of mettle which separates the wheat from the rabbit-food-chomping chaff and indicates somatic self-control. It is a barbaric rite that goes back centuries, and which was perfected by the forefathers of today’s fine-dining world: the French.
Haute cuisine purports to be a reaction against barbarism. The French-Moroccan writer Hourya Bentouhami has compared the literal height of “civilised” Western meal-taking, at table, with the floor-based setup of many Eastern food cultures: distance between hand and mouth, food and floor, stood for progress. Liver King, then, would seem if anything to be a model of regression. And yet his aesthetic has a covert parallel with the stuffed and roasted menageries scoffed by Versailles aristocrats. Liver King and his ilk are doing something many more official kings before them have done to project status and influence: playing with their food.
Part of Louis XIV’s courtly project was to project the idea of Enlightenment domination of man over nature. The grotesque spectacles of the royal table were symbolic of this — not just in their extravagance and quantity but in their brutality too, with ducks, geese, chickens and capons sewn up into meaty monstrosities, or giant frogs’ legs plonked on vermeil plates. Elaborate dining protocols, involving armies of waiters and public spectators who bowed to passing dishes, were mere set-dressing for caveman culinary tastes: the Sun King himself eschewed golden utensils in favour of his fists. Meat was invariably the centrepiece: delicate sugared cakes were ornamental feminine flourishes, but flesh was enrobed in masculine myths about the “mastery of fire and technique”, Bentouhami writes. The figure of the cockatrice — a chimaera of pig and poultry moulded in the form of a mythical serpent-bird — codifies this love affair between masculinity and meat: the cruelty and control is hyper-visible and elaborate. To have bizarre butchery at your table you needed money, discernment and a strong stomach, three qualities the Liver King himself would probably deem “alpha”. Ghosts of this association have persisted since in the culture of barbecue — the ritual of meat supervision has long been reserved for the suburban dad guarding the grill.
In the Liver King pantomime, cruelty becomes a way to intimidate and impress. His business model, like that of every influencer, is based on virality — a similar model to the trappings of royal courts, at which shocking displays of rarity or excess were used as projections of power. Modern fine-dining, particularly the descendants of Escoffier, retains the French court’s predilection for cruelty as a point of spectacle: canard à la presse — in which ducks are squished in great silver contraptions at prestigious Parisian restaurants — is partly a test of stomach for diners unperturbed by a ribbon of blood dribbling out into a sauce au sang. The dish has a strange provenance: Normandy farmers would hold ducks under their cloaks to shield them from wind and rain; those accidentally suffocated were snapped up by restaurateurs who found the blood retained in the carcass delicious. Today, avian analogues exist everywhere in la cuisine Gauloise: aside from the obvious — foie gras — the practice of eating a whole roasted ortolan with a serviette over your head (to hide the diner’s shame from the eyes of God, and their embarrassment at spitting out the tiny little bones) has been banned since 1995, but is still said to go on for diners with money and know-how.
These little baked birds embody the same transgressive lure of the Liver King’s slippery mounds of offal: both suggest that the greatest indulgences are brutal, borderline disgusting and primal. The fairly unappetising nature of these foods lends an air of discernment to the eater; fans of the ortolan have included François Mitterrand, António Egas Moniz (inventor of the lobotomy no less) and the food critic Craig Claiborne — who, upon winning an American Express auction in 1975, the prize for which was dinner for two at any restaurant in the world which took the credit card, chose Paris’s Chez Denise — and a course of ortolans.
It is not difficult to see the appeal of man and meat; the Liver King answers the needs of a slop-sickened American public which just wants a nice glossy coat. If you are what you eat, then ultra-processed foods must produce sluggish, hungry “ultra-processed people”. We are already trained on this formula: add the myths of gender, and you’ve got imaginative dynamite. Brian Johnson and his cult of “primals” are more than mere snake-oil evangelists: they are also inheritors of the brutal legend of Western food culture. He is not the first “king” to try to impress with fistfuls of flesh; King Donald, who is known for liking his own meat a little more well done, has done the same in his own special way with a White House table groaning under stacks of Big Macs.
As our political culture lurches back towards spectacles of omnipotence, perhaps we should expect the gutsy gastronomy of Liver King — and the Sun King before him — to return to mainstream conservative aesthetics. It was not long ago that Suella Braverman, then home secretary, was skewering the “tofu-eating wokerati”; elsewhere, a New York Times op-ed from 2016 boggled at Trump’s popularity among a public which was “used to seeing American politicians walk a careful line between red-meat populism and mainstream respectability”. Nine years on, red meat is fully back on the menu — and just like last week’s UK-US trade deal, which could see hormone-treated American beef hit UK shelves for the first time in decades, we have also imported Magaland’s bloody-minded populism. In this, the Liver King is prophetic: “To express your highest form, you gotta fuel like our ancestors… that’s the raw power our bodies crave.”
