American Psycho
The carnivore diet, The Century of the Self, and the fantasy of relentless consumption
Few things capture the spirit of late-stage capitalism quite like the rise of the carnivore diet. Not just because of its sheer nihilism, but because of the story it tells — about food, about the self, and about who matters.
At a time when scientists urge a massive dietary shift to prevent ecological collapse, when the brutality of animal agriculture is more visible than ever, and when nearly a billion people still go hungry every day, the carnivore diet offers a vision of total self-containment. A diet that consists of nothing but the bodies, eggs, and milk of animals isn’t meant to scale for the global population; quite the opposite, it’s solely for those who can afford to wall themselves off from the consequences of their consumption, and who are willing to let others bear them.
Let’s take the numbers seriously for a moment.
A person on the carnivore diet often consumes around two pounds of meat per day — 730 pounds per year. Multiply that by eight billion people and you get close to needing three billion tons of meat annually.
In 2022, global meat production was an already staggering 360 million tons. We’d have to increase it by a factor of 8 to 10, depending on the mix of animals. Currently, the world slaughters around 80 billion land animals each year; scaling up to meet carnivore levels would send us into the triple-digit billions or even trillions, when accounting for fish.
Of course, meat isn’t just violent but also woefully inefficient. Animal agriculture already occupies 77% of all agricultural land, yet provides only 18% of global calories. Most of that land isn’t used for the animals themselves, but for the crops they eat — corn, soy, wheat. Feed, not food.
To scale this up would require converting nearly all of Earth’s remaining arable land to pasture or feed crops — deforesting what’s left of the Amazon, displacing rural populations in the Global South, and accelerating biodiversity loss and soil collapse across the board.
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Held up by one of the most bloated and destructive systems on Earth, the carnivore diet fantasy depends on its own impossibility. Like the Atkins, paleo, and keto diets before it, the carnivore regime relies on externalizing harm — onto animals, workers, ecosystems, and future generations — in service of the individual. (The irony, of course, is that there’s near-unanimous opinion among physicians that the carnivore diet is also extremely unhealthy.)
This kind of self-obsession isn’t new. In his documentary The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis traces how corporations used Freud’s theories of desire to build a new kind of subject: the heroic individual consumer. Someone who no longer acts politically, but purchases emotionally. Whose identity isn’t built with others but apart from others, chosen through a curated set of choices in consumption. Not a citizen, but a brand.
Marketing shifted from meeting needs to cultivating wants. Health became self-mastery. Politics became personal development. And freedom became the right to choose whatever makes the individual feel good, no matter the cost.
The carnivore diet is a pure expression of this logic. It doesn’t care about systems. It doesn’t care about limits. It doesn’t care about the lives of animals or the collapse of the biosphere. Its only concern is the self: regulated, optimized, individualized.
What gets sold as “ancestral wisdom” or “biological truth” is really just unrestrained egomania wrapped in the language of health. There’s no communal future in this diet. Only a bunker mentality: sealed off, well-fed, and alone.
A Diet of Privilege
Perhaps no cultural figure better embodies this logic than American Psycho protagonist Patrick Bateman: the pristine body, the bloodlust beneath the performance of self-control. American Psycho is often read as a critique of capitalism’s surface obsessions, but it also captures the deeper vacancy of a self shaped entirely by consumption. No past, no future, just appetite in a suit.
None of this is accessible — economically, logistically, or ecologically. The carnivore diet is expensive, labor-intensive, and heavily dependent on industrial supply chains, fossil fuels, refrigeration, and land use on a staggering scale. It’s a rich-country project — a food ideology for those who already have more than enough. It’s a rejection not only of climate responsibility or animal ethics, but of basic human solidarity. An act of radical indifference, dressed up as wellness.
And yet its popularity is growing — perhaps not in spite of its excesses, but because of them. In an unraveling world, the carnivore diet doesn’t offer a solution. It offers a performance, a way to inhabit collapse without having to care. To double down on domination, to signal immunity from the costs of excess, to consume like nothing else matters and call it “healthy living”.
But this isn’t strength. It’s a retreat into appetite, into isolation, into a self so inflated it has no room left for anything else. A kind of bunker logic for the body — sealed off, self-reliant, impervious to the world outside. Just the cold comfort of consumption, dressed in the language of control.
Many carnivore dieters are of course deep in the Tate/Peterson/Rogan manosphere, red-pilled by grifters into chasing biological dominance at all costs. But plenty of others are just regular people — maybe anxious, maybe sick — grasping for something that feels solid. And maybe that’s the real seduction. In a collapsing world, the carnivore diet offers something simple: a story with clean edges. No ambiguity, no compromise. Just appetite, myth, and control.
It channels an old American logic — of dominion, of manifest destiny — repackaged for the body: conquer the land, conquer the animal, conquer the self. And in that vision, there’s no space left for care, cooperation, or kinship — only the illusion of total control as the world burns around you.
