After a medical checkup revealed benign polyps in his colon, Patrick Kong decided to clean up his diet. A food content creator, Mr. Kong makes his living by cooking and sharing more indulgent fare — doughnuts, burgers, unctuous cuts of fatty meat. But in his personal life, he started taking a more ascetic approach.
His go-to recipe combines rice and vegetables in a single pan, resulting in a lumpy concoction that he often tops with a protein like ground beef. “Just the idea of making a batch of kibble, or slop, where it’s essentially all your nutrients for the week,” he said. “And then you eat it throughout the week.”
The meal is referred to as “boy kibble” in some corners of the internet, and is consumed mainly by male fitness enthusiasts trying to reduce body fat and retain muscle mass. Mr. Kong, 28, used it to lose 20 pounds over six months.
He would prepare a large quantity, portion it out into identical Tupperware containers and eat it twice a day, sometimes adding different yogurt-based sauces to break up the monotony. “I would almost hit my protein goal, most of my fiber and other micronutrient goals,” he said. “And I’d also be in a calorie deficit; I would have a buffer where I could snack a little bit.”
Boy kibble — also known as “human kibble” since women eat it, too — is a ruthlessly efficient, male-coded rejoinder to the extemporaneous charms of “girl dinner.” The latter is a TikTok term for the assemblage of light bites that women sometimes cobble together and eat as a meal, with little care for gastronomic coherence. Boy kibble, in contrast, focuses on some nutritional ideal — here a mix of carbs, protein and fiber — that helps one achieve a specific body type or fitness goal. Pleasure-seeking details like flavor and aesthetics are tossed to the side.
Men are no strangers to dieting, of course: Many have tried the carb-averse, meat-centric carnivore diet, or fasted, or become obsessed with protein (or protein-maxxing, in current parlance).
Emily Contois, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa and the author of “Diners, Dudes and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture,” said that these types of meals were once relegated to members of certain fitness vocations — often professional athletes or competitive bodybuilders. She suggested that the phrase “boy kibble” might be a way to reframe these once-niche eating practices as they cross over into the mainstream.
The use of the word “boy” helps “soften what could be perceived as toxically masculine consumptive behaviors,” Ms. Contois said. This is especially relevant in light of a “backlash moment of men wanting to reclaim a more traditional, conventional masculine authority.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fitness mandates and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s contentious nutrition advice are examples of how food and health have been leveraged more broadly to symbolize, and even politicize, masculinity. And an entire ecosystem of popular health and longevity podcasters has helped rebrand diet culture, once primarily aimed at women, for men.
For some, boy kibble represents yet another hack in a culture obsessed with smoothing away life’s frictions. “I’ve always been sort of lazy in the kitchen and a prisoner to convenience,” said Cameron Cardenas, a barista and content creator in Los Angeles. A dedicated runner, he said he partook in boy kibble meals a few times a week to stay lean and maintain muscle.
“I don’t like spending a lot of time in the kitchen, and it’s affordable,” he said. “I knew it was an easy and quick way to get my macros.” The name, he says, “is spot-on,” and he agrees with its lighthearted, slightly mocking sentiment.
Online, the act of cooking and consuming boy kibble is often referred to as “ground beef o’clock,” and a profile of the type of person who makes and eats it has emerged. Social media indicates that these men tend to be American zoomers and millennials. Josh Rosen, a content creator, described the type as “a boy who is a few years out of post-grad, who was in a fraternity and is living in New York with their roommates who are also males.” Mr. Rosen, who is gay, jokingly posited that “ground beef o’clock” was an exclusively straight male phenomenon (it’s not), admitting that he ate boy kibble during college, when he lived with straight male roommates.
“I don’t think it’s disgusting,” he added. “But they used to make it every single night.”
Another user, Regin Mantuano, saw the classic boy kibble consumer as a typical corporate worker in his tech pants, fleece or puffer. That said, Mr. Matuano posted about making boy kibble in a “girl-dinner-trying-to-add-protein-to-my-meal way, not a scary-villainous-bro way.”
“I see this allowing men to sidestep the more feminine aspects of dieting,” said Adrienne Bitar, a professor at Cornell University who studies the cultural impact of food and health in America. “Where it’s seen as vain, frivolous, attention-seeking, superficial, men can say, Well, actually, this isn’t about vanity. This isn’t about appearance, necessarily. This is about optimization and quantifying how to become my best self.”
Ms. Bitar also said that there was a long history of people trying to find some “optimal nutritional substance” — see: Soylent, a tech-world fascination of the mid-2010s — and that the use of the word “boy” here could be seen as infantilizing.
“In contrast to girl dinner, which is fun, whimsical and creative,” said Ms. Bitar, boy kibble is not “focused on flavor, it’s not focused on joy. It’s focused on efficiency and results.”
For now, boy kibble is still a fringe meal option. But as GLP-1s reshape our relationship to food, and as social media gives voice to fitness influencers and their results-driven tips, interest is growing. Mr. Kong said that his boy kibble video was easily one of his best-performing posts from last year, and that he still received messages from followers telling him how it had helped them lose weight.
Mr. Cardenas said boy kibble had highlighted the differences in how he and his female friends interact with food. “I’ve noticed they’re a lot more patient with what they’re putting into their body — obviously health-wise, but they want it to taste good,” he said. “So I feel like what gives it that masculine edge is that there’s really not much to it, and it’s kind of gross the longer you eat it.”
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