A small sampling of TikTok discussions around the carnivore diet, featuring the cutting-boards-as-plates trend. | Photo illustration by Lille Allen; see below for additional image credits
The carnivore urge to not use a plate
There is much to gawk at when it comes to the rise of the carnivore influencers — those eaters who, fueled by the pursuit of the “ancestral lifestyle” or the desire to “heal” through food, have forsaken vegetables in favor of going “animal-based.” This leads them to gobble down “organ smoothies,” chew on chunks of brown butter as stand-ins for caramels (the diet forbids added sugars), and fly with containers of hamburgers and blocks of butter, lest they be swayed by the temptations of processed airport food.
Amid all of this potential rage bait — the benefits of which are dubious — one affectation of the carnivore diet has gone underexplored: the carnivore tendency to eat off wooden cutting boards instead of plates. On TikTok, shirtless, jacked men and girl-next-door-esque women alike present cutting boards arranged with their spreads of rare meat, eggs, and avocados. In one video, a creator shows off her “OMAD,” or “one meal a day”: On a cutting board sit slices of banana and avocado, stuffed dates, a pile of soft scrambled eggs, and three burger patties, each topped with cheese. In another, the cutting-board arrangement of meat, eggs, and potatoes bears the caption: “How humans were meant to eat.”
To be fair, many carnivores do eat off plates, but the wooden cutting board is so prevalent that carnivores often joke about it themselves. “If you are a carnivore or animal-based, it is actually in the handbook: You need a Boos Block cutting board,” Jack Turco, the carnivore influencer known for such dietary stunts as biting into blocks of butter at the airport and cooking large amounts of beef testicles, says in one video. “I eat off of it, I lick it, I cut my testicles on it, I eat my meat on it,” he adds.
Eating right off the cutting board could just be pragmatic: Why dirty the extra plate? It may be that the quantity of food fits better on a large cutting board than on a plate. Those who use kitchen knives to cut their meat as they eat might eat off boards because wood is better for knives than ceramic plates. It may just be a visual thing, as with all the charcuterie board spinoffs or the way so many food creators wear black gloves.
But the carnivore affinity for cutting boards seems to go beyond practicality alone to tie into the diet’s basic ideology. Many adherents of the diet are driven by the fantasy of the ancestral past. The cutting board — which is always wood, never plastic — suggests rustic simplicity, harkening to a primal nature and the way humans once ate. Often, they seem to also eat with their hands, and isn’t eating food right from where it was cut, using the most rustic implement of all, a way to have a more direct relationship to the food than transferring it to a plate and using utensils? Our ancestors didn’t have ceramic plates, they say.
As one person wrote on Reddit, “I associate eating on a cutting board as being the aesthetic of this WOE now.” In the world of niche diets like this one — WOE means “way of eating” — the cutting board might be like this language: a kind of in-group signaling.
Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t sold on another gimmicky diet might be reminded of an old adage: We want plates.
Additional image credits: Left image from @bh.gym/TikTok, middle image from @luvvsylv/TikTok, right image from @thefitadam/TikTok
