There’s much to marvel at when it comes to the rise of carnivore influencers—those eaters who, driven by a pursuit of the “ancestral lifestyle” or a desire to “heal” through food, eschew vegetables in favor of “animal-based” diets. This leads them to wolf down “offal smoothies,” chew on chunks of brown butter as a substitute for caramel (the diet bans added sugar), and fly with containers full of hamburgers and chunks of butter so they don’t get knocked over by the temptations of processed airport food.
Amid all these potential rage baits—the benefits of which are questionable—one affectation of the carnivore diet has been little explored: the tendency of carnivores to eat from wooden cutting boards rather than plates. On TikTok, shirtless, pumped-up men and women alike display cutting boards on which they arrange raw meat, eggs, and avocados, girl-next-door-style. In one video, a creator shows off her “OMAD,” or “one meal a day”: On a cutting board lie slices of banana and avocado, stuffed dates, a pile of soft scrambled eggs, and three burger patties, each topped with cheese. In another video, the arrangement of meat, eggs, and potatoes on the cutting board is captioned, “How humans should eat.” Many of these creators appear to be eating with their hands.
To be fair, many carnivores eat off plates, but the wooden cutting board is so common that carnivores themselves often joke about it. “If you’re a carnivore or animal eater, it’s actually in the manual: You need a Boos Block cutting board,” says Jack Turco, the carnivore influencer known for such nutritional stunts as biting into blocks of butter at the airport and cooking large quantities of beef testicles, in a video. “I eat off it, I lick it, I cut my testicles on it, I eat my meat on it,” he adds.
Eating directly from the cutting board could simply be pragmatic: why dirty the extra plate? Maybe the amount of food fits better on a large cutting board than on a plate. People who cut their meat with kitchen knives at dinner might eat off boards because wood is better for knives than ceramic plates. Maybe it’s just a visual thing, like all the charcuterie board spin-offs or the fact that so many chefs wear black gloves.
Yet the carnivores’ preference for cutting boards seems to go beyond mere practicality and has to do with the basic ideology of the diet. Many followers of this diet are driven by ancestral fantasy. The cutting board – which is always made of wood and never plastic – conveys rustic simplicity, reminiscent of a primal nature and the way people once ate. They often seem to eat with their hands too, and isn’t eating the food right where it was cut, using the most rustic of utensils, a way to establish a more direct relationship with food than putting it on a plate and using cutlery? Our ancestors didn’t have ceramic plates, they say.
Someone wrote on Reddit: “I associate eating on a cutting board with the aesthetic of this WOE.” In the world of niche diets like this—WOE means “way of eating”—the cutting board could be like that language: a form of in-group signaling.
Meanwhile, those of us who are not convinced by yet another diet of gimmicks might remember an old saying: We want plates.
Additional photo credits: Left photo by @bh.gym/TikTok, middle image by @luvvsylv/TikTok, right picture by @thefitadam/TikTok
