‘So everything I learned was all the mainstream, “Eat your fibre, eat your fruits and veggies, get a little bit of meat, but make sure it’s lean”… But that’s what I was doing and it wasn’t helping me. So when I was presented with an alternate option, while it seemed crazy, it seemed like, hey, this is something I haven’t tried yet, and so I dove right in.’
Some intrepid carnivores have reported more serious concerns about the diet. The singer James Blunt said on a podcast in 2020 that he tried an all-meat diet for about two months while at university – only to develop symptoms of scurvy, resulting from a lack of vitamin C.
There are also the obvious environmental issues , with a quarter of global greenhouse-gas emissions from food production said to result from beef alone. For Geissert, this isn’t a concern. ‘I don’t worry about the environmental implications because I believe that regenerative farming is actually the way to preserve our climate,’ she says.
Loyal members of the carnivore club remain keen to discuss the myriad ways in which they say it has transformed their lives. Michael Mason, 59, has been a practising carnivore for more than 20 years, having previously experimented with other diets, including veganism, which he tried in the 1980s.
It was only when he landed upon carnivorism that Mason felt he’d cracked the dietary code: ‘I just knew that I felt better… I had so much more energy.’
Nowadays, Mason describes his diet as ‘90 to 95 per cent meat-based’. It is less strict than Geissert’s – he seasons his food with herbs, breaking the plant-free clause, and will occasionally make a side salad to add ‘texture’ – but he is teetotal and only eats twice a day, most often meat or eggs. Sometimes it’ll be deer testicles, of which he’s a fan.
When I meet him over Zoom, he is planning his meals for the day: ‘Some venison loin, which I’ll have for lunch, and this evening I’ll either have more of that or some eggs.’ He says he enjoys sourcing his meat from local farmers. ‘I walk past the cows, I know where it’s come from.’
Mason looks half his age, muscular with taut, glowing skin. Perhaps he knows it. ‘Without sounding up my arse, I’m 59… I don’t understand anything about age and what you’re meant to feel like, but all I know is that I feel really good physically and mentally,’ he says. He adds that he sometimes looks at other people his age – ‘they’re all on statins, they’ve all got diabetes, they’re all overweight’ – and feels like he’s from ‘a different universe’.