Boy Kibble craze a soul-destroying approach to maxxing meal plans

Sometimes, when I am filling my dog’s bowl with tiny brown triangles, I have the (depressing) thought: I wish there was such a thing as human kibble, so I didn’t have to work out what to feed myself all the time. Pre-portioned, perfectly macro-balanced sustenance, so I can just eat my People Chow and move on with my day.

Well, it turns out this dream is alive on TikTok, where health-conscious young men are snarfing down Boy Kibble.

Boy Kibble is essentially a slop concoction consisting of ground beef, rice and (maybe) veggies that looks, well, like dog food. The theory is it’s an easy, cost-effective way to help support gains made in the gym.

You might think that Boy Kibble is analogous to that other viral trend, Girl Dinner, but it’s not, not really.

Girl Dinner — disparate snacks that come together on a (cute) plate to compose a whole — is about liberating us from the idea that the evening meal always requires a pre-heated oven and chopping, and that it always needs to look like a full roast and two sides. It liberates us from the idea that dinner, as a concept, always requires labour.

While both have an element of ease, Girl Dinner is about joy and intuition, pleasure and presentation. Boy Kibble is about discipline.

The “kibble” of it all doesn’t derive from the fact it looks and sounds suspiciously like homemade dog food. The “kibble” is in the repetition. It’s in the optimization.

It’s a different name for “meal prep,” another optimization trend that has convinced us to spend our precious Sunday afternoons portioning out meals into glass containers so we can “maximize” our time during the work week.

Notice how in the modern pursuit of an efficient, frictionless life, it’s always sources of joy that get sanded down into nothing.

“Uniform dressing” — the executive strategy of always wearing the same thing to eliminate choice in the morning — takes away the fun and play of fashion.

“Sad desk salads” — romaine lettuce, solitary cherry tomato, ineffectual plastic fork — might suggest you care about your health, but not enough to take an actual lunch break in the sunshine outside.

Delivery apps mean convenience, but they also means you don’t get to know the baristas at your local coffee shop, or have the chance to become a “regular” anywhere.

“Getting your steps in” can look like a beautiful walk in nature with a friend, but be honest: it more often looks like doing laps around a grey building while you take meetings on your phone.

Modern life increasingly feels as if we’re all just ingesting various bowls of slop so we can get back to work. Born to enjoy, forced to maxx, to borrow the gen-Z suffix dedicated to optimization.

I really thought hustle culture would die with millennials, but no, the kids are out there maximizing: looksmaxxing, healthmaxxing, proteinmaxxing, fibremaxxing, sleepmaxxing. Now they are nothingmaxxing, which is just resting, because even rest must be optimized.

The anhedonistic, Boy Kibble view of food is part of this culture. Appetites, cravings, eating itself — all of these are inconveniences to be managed and maxxed.

But we lose a lot when all pleasure is divorced from food. Food is fuel, yes, but it’s also connection and celebration and love. It’s Sunday-morning pancakes or a perfectly flaky almond croissant or a mustard-slathered hot dog at a baseball game or a pile of glossy noodles from your favourite Chinese takeout or onions frying in butter or care-package chocolate chip cookies.

I’m not saying that every meal of the day needs to be indulgent and lingered over with friends. I’m not even saying that every meal of the day needs to be delicious. Sometimes you just need to eat some boring protein and fibre and crack on. But, my goodness, some of them should be.

Even though feeding yourself three times a day can be annoying (dinner, again!?) the alternative is downright grim. Reducing food to sustenance, to kibble — have you ever heard of anything so joyless?

I mean, even dogs get treats.

winnipegfreepress.com/jenzoratti