For the last thirteen days John – who has chosen not to share his surname for privacy reasons – has been chowing down on raw chicken. He slathers slabs of chicken breast in ranch dressing, elegantly sips on chicken blood and chugs raw eggs from Martini glasses, while filming it all for his 300,000 Instagram followers. He intends to keep going until he gets “a tummy ache”. According to John, it’s all in the name of science: He firmly believes that eating raw meat is not as horrifying as we have been led to believe.
Bloody diarrhea, fever, vomiting, stomach cramps, numbness, parasites and septicemia are just a few of the reasons why eating raw chicken is strongly advised against. But for John, this is just a small price to pay: His “raw meat experiment” videos are going viral, with some reaching up to eight million views.
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John has no scientific qualifications, but he’s been doing his own personal research, and from this he’s concluded that he’ll be absolutely fine. “For the love of all things sanity, do NOT attempt what this man is doing, this is so stupid,” begged one horrified doctor in the comments, but this is not John’s first rodeo.
Two years ago, he posted a series of YouTube videos titled “Eating raw meat at Whole Foods every day till I die from bacteria” until he got bored after 200 days. Spoiler, he didn’t die or actually even get sick. So, this year, he’s going one step further to prove his point. Is he clucking mad or he is just a man on a mission to prove people wrong? We interviewed him to find out.
VICE: Hey John. Firstly, are you feeling well enough to do an interview, any signs of a tummy ache?
John: I feel absolutely fine. Which is a shame because I’m a big fan of diarrhea… joke.
I think it’s fair to say most people would say this is a pretty extreme experiment – why are you doing it?
I used to be a vegan and was very much of the mindset that animal food products are bad and pointless. I was trying to eat as many fruits and vegetables, kombucha and superfood powders as I could to be healthy, but I just felt it wasn’t working properly. I had cystic acne, back pain, dizziness, low energy, and some days I couldn’t even get out of bed. I tried everything – and added sea moss to all of my smoothies – but nothing worked to make me feel better. I got really into researching weird diets from around the world. I got into many YouTube rabbit holes about how eating meat is actually really healthy and became obsessed.
I started reading old books about the philosophy of why people prefer eating raw. This led to researching and wanting to try eating raw meat to see what would happen, so I broke my veganism in 2019. Raw milk was actually my first gateway into the raw food world. There’s so much stuff out there about raw milk being bad for you – like, why would a grown man be drinking milk? I’d not touched lactose because people had said to avoid it if you have acne problems, but nothing bad happened. Learning about the nutritional value of things made me start on raw eggs later down the road too.
What made you start a social media account to document this process?
For the last ten years, I’ve been making memes as a career. To learn more about the raw meat community, I made a meme page called ‘Meat Based News’ where I’d make memes about that lifestyle. I set up a YouTube account in 2021 where I’d sit outside Wholefoods and try different raw meats: beef, kangaroo, veal brain. I guess the purpose was to raise awareness that eating raw meat might not be as bad for you as you think. I lasted about 200 days before I got bored of the time it took to drive to Whole Foods, make the videos and write the captions. I wanted to be extremely confusing in a way; where someone was watching me eating something disgusting, but also learning from it and laughing.
This year I was sitting at my girlfriend’s house looking through those videos and found a chicken one I did. I reposted that video and it went on the ‘Explore’ page – that’s when things started going crazy. It was all hate and anger and people were messaging me saying I was going to die. I thought there was something there as an idea, so I set up my separate ‘Raw Chicken Experiment’ page. I figured it would be fun to go full blown with this as an idea and piss everyone off. Comedy is a huge part of who I am; I like writing unhinged captions. I know 90% of people aren’t interested in learning anything about nutrition and stuff, and that’s fine too.
What does it taste like?
The taste is barely there. It’s like scallop or shrimp; sort of tastes like sashimi. I used to have to gear myself up to eat it, but not anymore.
Tell us about the response you’ve been getting online.
People are trying to say I’m doing it for clout, but I’ve had meme pages with millions of followers before I ever started doing this. Honestly, eating raw meat on the internet is not good for attention anyway. I had text messages from all of my co-workers asking, ‘Is everything okay?’ People do get quite angry and call me stupid, but they haven’t researched in the same way I have. I’ve had at least a thousand DM’s with people being sincere and thanking me for my content and raising awareness. I do find people’s reactions really funny, and getting tens of thousands of people telling me I’m 100% going to die makes me want to do this more out of spite. Of all the social media accounts I’ve ever made, this is by far the page that’s had the biggest growth in such a short amount of time.
How has your family and girlfriend reacted?
It took a lot of explaining, but they’ve seen me do weird stuff before. My girlfriend’s parents will joke around saying, ‘You can come round for dinner but it will be cooked.’
Is it pointless asking if you received any medical advice about this?
I think it would be close to impossible to get someone to agree this is a good idea. Someone online said, ‘My husband’s a doctor, he said you’ll probably be fine,’ but that’s pretty much it.
In Japan, they’ll have raw chicken on menus. I don’t think it’s the raw chicken itself that will kill you, it’s more what they’re doing to the animals in the factory farms. I’m getting the chickens from a farm half an hour away; they don’t use antibiotics, chlorine or injections. They live out in the sun eating a natural diet, which is as normal as a chicken can be. It’s not like I’m testing Walmart chicken. I guess I’m gambling on farm chicken being safer.
I used to go on five-day benders, but for the past few years I’ve stopped having any caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, pills, supplements or powders. The only thing I get high off now is eating raw chicken and brains. I’ve been used to pushing my body to the limit, so what’s a bit of chicken going to do? I’ve been on the verge of death from drinking 45 White Claws [alcoholic seltzers] in a night. If that kind of drinking didn’t kill me, I don’t think a piece of chicken can.
Do you not have any fears or concerns about this at all?
In my mind, I feel a 75 percent chance that I’ll be fine for 100 days. I think: What’s the worst thing that’s gonna happen? I’ll shit myself for a week or something, but I’ve probably done worse things than that before in my life. I try to put disclaimers up all the time that I don’t think anyone else should do this. Even in my nutritional research, there are better raw foods to be eating, like beef. This is just a personal experiment for me. Choosing to do this with chicken specifically is more about me trying something that no one else would dare to do and testing the limits. If something happens to me, it’s my fault, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine.
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