The Department of Health and Human Services has officially placed the marbled steak at the top of the food pyramid. It is time we stopped resisting our prehistoric era and started romanticizing the meat sweats.
You wake up. You do your lymphatic drainage massage. You lace up your oversized, aggressively cushioned running shoes that have never touched gravel. But as you stand in your kitchen, staring down at your spirulina smoothie, you have to ask yourself a hard question: are you truly honoring your prehistoric ancestors? Or are you actively resisting the Department of Health and Human Services’ new mandate to consume a bleeding slab of beef before 9 a.m.?
For months, we have been watching the soft launch of the government’s new dietary guidelines, and so many of us have been reacting from a place of unhealed, plant-based trauma. When Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a photo of himself for his 72nd birthday, tucking into a massive, bone-in steak decked out with candles, he wasn’t just celebrating a milestone. He was modeling a new love language for our internal organs. By placing a marbled rib eye in the pole position of the new federal food pyramid, the administration is giving us permission to let go of our restrictive oat-milk narratives and romanticize the cardiovascular event.
We are so quick to judge the twice-a-day beef lifestyle as "unsustainable" or "a rapid acceleration of global ecological collapse." But isn't the real ick the way we deny ourselves the simple, intentional joy of chewing through a pound of animal muscle while checking our morning emails? When Vice President Vance and other Cabinet members embraced this beef-intensive protocol, it wasn’t politics. It was a commitment to living authentically as late-Pleistocene hunter-gatherers who also happen to have Secret Service protection and federal expense accounts.
Take Harper, a digital content strategist in Denver. She recently swapped her morning green juice for a 16-ounce sirloin, and she says it has entirely shifted her energetic frequency. She just sits at her kitchen island, being really present with the chewing, tearing into the flank steak with her canines. For her, it’s a non-negotiable boundary against the modern world.
When the Health Secretary went to CattleCon and begged ranchers to increase their herds, it really spoke to my own journey of manifesting abundance and setting firmer boundaries with my colon.
When Kennedy dropped by that trade show in February to beg the assembled ranchers for more cows, boasting to the hooting crowd that he eats beef every day, twice a day, the media tried to frame it as a bizarre agricultural policy pivot. But if you look closely, CattleCon was essentially a wellness retreat. He was asking us to do the work. The 90-page document HHS published to lay out the “scientific foundation” for the new pyramid is, if we are being honest with ourselves, the ultimate journaling prompt. It is asking us to look inward, bypass our modern evolutionary adaptations, and ask what a caveman would do if he had access to a federally subsidized industrial feedlot.
So tonight, when you’re figuring out your girl dinner, skip the crackers and the grapes. Go to your local butcher. Ask for the thickest cut of prehistoric wellness they legally sell. Light a $70 cardamom-scented candle, sear the meat until it barely stops mooing, and lean into the ritual. Your ancestors are watching, and more importantly, so is the Cabinet.