Opinion
Every so often, the internet reinvents the way we stuff our collective gob. Eating a charcuterie board on your own was rebranded “girl dinner”, a series of increasingly bright red men have been pushing something called the “carnivore diet” and I’m sure, on some corner of social media, eating peasant gruel is known as “Olivermaxxing”.
But on this blessed day, it is my obscene pleasure to introduce you to “boy kibble” – a trend that not only exists, but is one I believe myself to have been an accidental pioneer of, many years ago
You may have already heard the term “boy kibble” on TikTok, or on Instagram, or being recited over and over in a kind of Gregorian chant performed by a series of cloaked figures you happened upon in an abandoned storm drain (I don’t know how you live your life).
If you haven’t, this is what you need to know.
This new food trend seems to begin at the truism that all men are dogs. And how are we dogs to keep our coats shiny, muscles strong and our teeth pearly if not with boy kibble? The tried-and-true art of putting a bunch of junk in a bowl, mixing it up and shovelling it into your mouth – usually while watching a YouTube compilation titled something like “Most BRUTAL knockouts”.
To me, this is a rite of passage. Boy kibble – also known as the gender-neutral “human kibble” or “bachelor chow”, as I referred to this kind of meal long before it became a trend – is part of every boy’s culinary evolution when he realises that man cannot live on sausage rolls alone.
It’s important to know that I do not come from cooking stock. As a kid, our dinner bell was the fire alarm, so when I left home, my only cooking skills came from working the grill at McDonald’s.
When my university days came around, and I was studying while living off the abundant salary of a dish pig, I subsisted off microwave rice and a tin of tuna. If I had picked up a paid stand-up comedy gig that week, I might splurge at the supermarket on a vegetable. Happy days.
This is part of every growing young man’s journey from disgusting teenager to slightly less disgusting functioning adult. Feeding yourself is an essential part of the Bildungsroman curriculum that includes learning it is legal to wash your sheets, mattresses belong on a bed frame, and just because you can ingest something doesn’t mean that you should ingest it.
In the algorithmically optimised world, these journeys are super-charged by superbly edited video tutorials. The 2026 iteration of this particular trend starts with a food-content creator named Patrick Kong and his simple recipe to sauté vegetables, add rice, top with meat and put in plastic containers.
Yes, boy kibble is meal-prep redressed for a new generation, with the underlying message: eat like dogs, look like gods.
The value proposition here is that if you eat a nutritious meal and exercise more, your health will improve. This is the kind of thing that’s interesting when said on TikTok and tiresome when said by your mother or a healthcare professional.
So, what elevates the Boy Kibble from eating a vaguely simple and boring meal to the vaunted heights of media-worthy TikTok trend worthy of a soon-to-be Pulitzer-winning New York Times explainer piece? Not much. Perhaps the only explanation is that this meal-prepping phenomena has gifted society with extra time, energy, and brain space to consider grander questions like, “Do things taste better out of a bowl?” (The answer is, undoubtedly, yes.)
We could put grander illusions onto the incredible phenomena of having food out of a bowl. We could speak about this being part of the trend of emphasising protein-above-everything to the point that soups, yoghurts, tofu and probably several toxic kitchen-cleaning products are espousing their protein content.
Perhaps you’d expect me to connect this trend to the often very toxic male-diet culture and other trends such as “looksmaxxing” (wherein influencers teach boys how to improve their physical appearance through often-controversial means), but there is an important consideration to make before we walk down that path. It’s that new trends, which sound boring and sad and require me to Google several “words” I do not wish to learn, often lead me to become aware of people who say those words and, frankly, I’d die happier not knowing any of them.
Still, as someone who has walked this path before, I must warn you of what lies ahead.
Sure, it starts with simple meal prep. You save money, you feel better, you don’t get scurvy any more. But at what cost?
Soon, you will discover that different foods have different flavours, and as the cook, it is in your remit to use whatever flavours you choose. This leads to a difficult experimental phase. Yes, I am thinking of one particular night when I wondered if avocado could be cooked in a stir-fry. The answer? Technically yes, morally no.
Then, all of a sudden, you are in your mid-30s and have 12 hours to spare while your smoker slow-cooks the pork belly, so you might as well get to pickling those red onions you have bought.
Oh, and you also brought home something called scorzonera, which sounds closer to a skin-care ointment than a vegetable. But now you’ve got it, so you need to learn how to use it, and God forbid you try to get a toddler to eat it. Soon you’re longing for the days when all you had to do was mix some cooked mince through a packet of microwave rice and call that dinner.
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James Colley is a comedian from Western Sydney and head writer for ABC TV’s Gruen and Question Everything.
