Max the Meat Guy is desecrating another animal. He’s squeezing it. It’s juicy & he just set it on fire. I’m alone & I don’t even eat jerky, but I listen to him plug his beef jerky startup. I watch more Meat Guy shorts until YouTube won’t load any more.

In “Thor’s hammer cooked in fire salt…,” the Meat Guy, born Max Greb,  “completely blows up” the cut w/ rendered, injected bone marrow. I don’t know from where the shank originates or what it does when it’s part of something living. The freshest meat I’ve seen comes on a styrofoam tray. The Meat Guy buries this cut in salt binded w/ whiskey. He makes tacos w/ it.

The Meat Guy videos are part of a short-form video trend that I can only trace back to the launch of Buzzfeed’s Tasty brand in 2015. The form promises me that I, too, might become a pair of disembodied hands that slap meat & deploy grill weights.

In these videos, all variation is an illusion. The only outcome is already known: snack! Ina Garten is now a 26 y/o man who’s doing everything he can to not fuck his brisket on camera. He reclaims & monetizes the unpaid kitchen work once reserved for the kinds of wives that never existed.

Blowtorch, cleaver, Traeger™: the war afforded at home is the torture of things that can’t scream. In the vacuum of better fantasies, men LARP as chefs & grillmasters. There’s no conviction in their actions. Instead of dying for something worthwhile, a man named Bayashi regularly butterflies raw chicken breasts & splays them open like labia.

Above all, Owen Han epitomizes the form. Handsome & seemingly tall, his videos are violently edited to sync each cut to the sounds of a cleaver cutting through meat & into a cutting board; of a metal spoon striking into a pan a dollop of lard; of an immersion blender blasting aioli into being. He bisects large sourdough loaves & invites the viewer to believe in bread. Everything is new, is a toy, is meant to be burned, shredded & rebuilt into a sandwich.

These creators almost always cook alone. Minus a few cuts to their faces to show their reactions (faux-strain of grating cheese), the viewer witnesses each video as if through the eyes of the creator, or some goblin looking over the countertop. Creator & viewer are both disembodied. I want to become only those hands, gloved in Evil Angel latex. I want to shred pork butt. If I watch enough of Han, I feel an epileptic aura glowing in my toes. I calm down by watching tex-mex recipes from Zachwiththefatback.

I flip past any video of a man who’s made happy by something other than double-killing ingredients. The tragedy of a chef like J. Kenji López-Alt is that he’s too likable. I think I know how many kids he has. Parent & provider, he’s unafraid to display fingernails painted by his 2 daughters. Han, however, appears so often alone, therefore is someone I’m capable of becoming.

As a child, I watched Food Network daily. My first brush w/ sexual desire was seeing the unfiltered Italianx insanity of longtime host Giada de Laurentiis. Ina Garten herself was something of a third grandma to me. I never cooked their recipes & I probably never will.  As a kid, I soaked stale bagels in cup-noodle broth. I didn’t cook a steak until I was 20.

Food Network shows at least had narrative structure: an introduction + dialogue w/ audience; prep before stovetop action; plating & consumption, often w/ friends/family. The newer cookery content is instead performed in an infinite replay loop: Han’s videos begin w/ the cutting of a sandwich, which he squeezes so the viewer knows it’s juicy. The video will then cut to him eating, smiling, to remind the viewer that they too can be handsome & lonely in an industrial ghost kitchen. He ends each video holding a knife over his sandwich. We begin again, so much action directed at itself.

The how-to has been uncoupled from utility. This is the future we choose daily: instructional content performed as parody. Their creators should probably be in more directly dishonest professions, like Hertz customer service or whatever lifecycle marketing is. They’re servicing a demand for a quiet mind-fry. 

This content isn’t art, though. It can’t address self-investigation as it crowds the limited attention we have for representational forms. We’ve made too much room for the thousands of thirteen seconds that’re now the pinnacle of entertainment. This content is a sort of ciabatta: so natural & filling that it feels as old as Rome, though it’s younger than our mothers. The speed at which people adapted to it—less than 20 years—shows no one ever wanted to read an article, let alone a whole book. We might read more words than ever, but we want them piecemeal.

Every millennial “bylines in…” writer has a nostalgia slop-ed abt some perceived innocence of the internet in the early 2000s. As if we all didn’t see our 1st beheadings there. As if it wasn’t a network of unfettered pedophiles then as it is now. As if it didn’t reset our expectations in such a way that I watch the Meat Guy chine a rib roast & excavate its pellicule & replace it w/ bacon/gorgonzola jam before he cooks it low & slow before watching it again. It’s the gluttony of eating styrofoam.

I lost abt 4 years of my life—from graduation to COVID—ingesting content like this. In that time, I read just 6 books. I only watch these creators through YouTube Shorts bc I draw an arbitrary line in the sand before redownloading TikTok again. Its algo knows me better than my mother or Ina Garten ever could. All those years & I only read 6 books.

It’s my task to at least pretend to live a life of consideration. I have to read more than 6 books, eventually. I install a Chrome plug-in to block YouTube Shorts. I think of what I’ll miss: Han & the Meat Guy & all the assorted desk celebrities. Rainbolt, immobile but for when he shifts from resting his head on his hand to not resting his head on his hand. He valorizes the leisure of small topics in the way Hasan Piker valorizes yelling at/abt people who huff paint. They live lives where fun is their job. They seem deep-fried & bored. There’s no escape. 

Somewhere, Rainbolt must be looking at the world & its countless variations. He is alone, discerning dirts. I’m alone, too, thinking of him discerning dirts. I have to read more than 6 books. I’m hungry, wondering who took—who fucked?—all the food.

Aaron Tomey is from Georgia, lived in St. Louis, and now lives in Brooklyn. His essays have previously appeared in Hobart, Bushwick Burner Phone, and Apocalypse Confidential. He can also be found on Twitter: @ecstatic_donut.

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