Across the far right, a paranoid prophecy has been taking hold: the belief that globalist elites want to take meat off the menu and replace it with insects. The charge has been spouted in one version or another by provocateurs like Tucker Carlson, Mike Cernovich, and Jordan Peterson, and repeated by countless accounts on social media.

The claim has found its way into the sloganeering of major right-wing political parties around the world, from the Conservative Party of Canada to Lega in Italy, and the Law and Justice party in Poland. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis invoked the specter of insect-eating when he banned the production and sale of cultivated meat in his state.

These claims frequently accompany advocacy for meat-heavy, protein-packed diets — ascendant within the so-called manosphere and across the right more broadly — that ostensibly hearken back to our Paleolithic ancestors, who, the thinking goes, dined on freshly-hunted prey instead of the processed slop churned out by our modern food system. Jordan Peterson, for instance, is a vocal proponent of an all-meat carnivore diet, which he compares favorably to the diets of hunter-gatherers and contrasts to contemporary diets he suggests have too many carbohydrates. “Maybe human beings should be in hunting mode all the time,” he said in 2022.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate widely divergent diets shaped by climate, geography, and availability. And while they certainly ate meat, they had no guarantee of successful hunts and scant means of preserving fresh kills. In fact, according to a recent paper in the journal Science Advances, that presents a peculiar twist: Putrefying meat attracted flies, which laid eggs that hatched into maggots, which in turn probably provided a ready source of protein to early hunters.

Ironically, then, part of the Paleolithic diet likely was bugs.

Carnivore influencers misunderstand not just where ancient humans got their animal protein, but also how much of it they ate. In The Meat Question, a sprawling history of humans’ relationship to meat, anthropologist Josh Berson writes: “if anything, it is ‘modern’ urban populations, particularly in the United States, that exhibit specialization for animal consumption — not the foragers so often held up as models of a meat-eating subsistence strategy.”

In other words, those who suggest that we’ve fallen from pre-modern meat-eating übermen to plant-gnawing and bug-curious untermen have their history backward. It was only with the advent of modern factory farming that meat became so reliable and ubiquitous that Americans can now eat it three times a day.

Read more Vox coverage of the science, culture, and politics of meat

• The myths we tell ourselves about American farming

• You’re being lied to about “ultra-processed” foods

• What the MAHA movement gets wrong about meat

Myths about how we used to eat and, perhaps, should eat again, matter politically now more than ever. The image of prehistoric man the hunter looms over contemporary “gastro-politics,” reflecting pervasive social and political anxieties about the food we eat. The Make America Healthy Again movement has been buoyed by a growing cultural obsession with carnivore and paleo diets and protein — entrails, tallow, and marrow are all chic; there are calls to double down on meat in federal nutrition guidelines. All of it dovetails with

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