The Biblical Diet, Clean Eating, and its Fascistic Appeal

October 13, 2025 Newsletter

A lot of girls on TikTok have fallen into fascination with “Biblical fruit,” a subsect of the wider Catholic aesthetic revival happening amongst our generation. Biblical fruit refers to pomegranates, dates, figs, and other rich and messy fruits that Jesus might have eaten. I know we all know about the “pomegranate girl” who is obsessed with pomegranates and that seems to constitute a personality trait. I think those girls are allowed to have fun with their pomegranates, but this Biblical fruit crowd is a lot more concerning to me.

One of the diets I’ve been seeing online, as maybe a sort of alt-right feminine counterpart to the alt-right masculine carnivore diet, is the Biblical diet, which basically co-opts Syrian, Palestinian, Jordanian, Lebanese, and Egyptian cuisine with a bland twist to mimic the diet that Jesus might have had. A lot of the diet consists of flatbreads, nuts, legumes, fish, stone fruits, and olive oil. A lot of videos about this diet feel similar to the Ancestral diet discourse, wherein people are trying to mimic a past food terrain but cannot because we are less likely to eat seasonally, locally, and without additives. The Biblical diet feels like another way for Christians to explore and disperse Christianity, while somehow including emphasis on clean-eating and raw milk. Everything comes back to raw milk. They didn’t have pasteurization in Biblical times, but they also didn’t have Tiktok and GMOs either.

I hate to bring it back to fascism, but I really don’t. A lot of the appeal of fascist dictators such as Hitler and Trump is that they have a past ideal in mind. They can point to a historical reference and say: “We need to go back to that!” For Hitler, it was Ancient Greece, and for Trump, it’s 1870-1913. A lot of people resonate with historical regression because it is a lot more comfortable to rely on the past than invest in the unknown future. A lot of this clean eating, ancestral diet stuff feels eerily similar to the comfort found in fascism—a strengthening of the state because it is the only consistent power in its cruelty. I think that clean eating has been severely skewed and has been co-opted by RFK Jr and his minions to be a way for food to be a political power, not a necessity. Clean eating started as a sort of resistance to the government’s peddling of convenience culture, but has warped into a shame-tactic against the lower class and those without access to organic, GMO-free produce and unprocessed groceries. A lot of the problem with the clean-eating discourse is that it’s not solving the food-desert and food-insecurity crises, it’s just blaming working-class individuals for their lack of healthy eating when processed and undesirable foods are often the cheapest and most time-accessible option. Michelle Obama tried to improve school lunches and was laughed at—now RFK Jr is doing the same, but only now within the context of MAHA and its chokehold on the American peoples. It’s a lot easier for upper-class individuals to decide to eat healthy. Growing up in Portland, Oregon, granola culture was in full swing, and a lot of the wealthy families placed importance on organic, unprocessed foods. Farmers markets became increasingly more expensive and inaccessible to those who want and need fresh produce. Co-ops and other activist grocery stores were the most expensive stores in town. I worked for an Italian grocery store that weirdly favored European food as the cleanest way of eating, and the produce was out-of-this-world expensive. Don’t even get me started on Erewhon and other luxury grocery stores. The phrase “luxury grocery store” makes me feel sick already.

Healthy food should be accessible to everyone, obviously. Programs like food stamps and EBT are the programs that kept my mom and her four sisters alive when she grew up below the poverty line. The same administration that is peddling “clean eating” is defunding the programs that allow access to healthy foods. This is because it’s not really about “clean eating,” it’s about creating a healthy, emboldened upper-class and depriving the working-class into subjection. Trump canceled 94 million pounds of food aid, but RFK Jr wants you to buy the $20 raw milk from the luxury grocery store! This is also why skinny is in. A weak, underfed, and misfed population is a controllable one. Your brain will not function properly if you are starving. Your body will literally go into survival mode. Eat your oats please!

To bring this all back to the Biblical diet, I understand the appeal of Ancestral eating because it makes us feel in-tune with Jesus and our ancestors and whatnot. It also feels clean because we are mimicking a time without pesticides and Red 40, but the way that this diet has been dispersed online is quite harmful. Eating this way will not lead you to salvation, and it does not make you better than those that don’t. A lot of my problem with this diet is that it feels like a pillar of the Catholic resurgence happening in the mainstream right now, which mirrors Coquette-core in its gentle and soft feminine properties, but also brings a certain edge with bleeding pomegranates and slaughtered lambs and whatnot. Catholicism has become a symptom of weird, morbidly-curious individuals who are interested in devotion, sacrifice, and confession. Catholicism and its imagery has almost become a kink. It’s all about understanding our “corruption” as humans and our efforts to stay pure and avoid sin in a world of blood and guts and sex and death.

The Church itself is a capital, and its aestheticization is a major win. The Church used to accept bribes so that the briber had a guaranteed spot in heaven. Now, the Church has tap-to-pay tipping machines and is successfully propagandizing on TikTok.

Violence doesn’t always mean death, it means fabulation, propaganda, misinformation, cruelty, and monopoly. It means capitalism and the co-opting of and capital on information by world powers. It means the difference between information and truth, and the mis-equation of the two. It means psychological horror as much as physical. The violence we are trying to save ourselves from is bundled up in the state, and the state’s relation to the Church. 

All of this is to say— don’t be fooled by the slaughtered lamb, bloody fruit, blood on a white dress sort of aesthetic peddled to you online. Think about what you’re subscribing to when you invest in these kinds of subcultures. Everything comes from somewhere. Don’t think that ancestral eating will save you from our current horrors. Be present in the here and now—to circumvent the present and return to the past is how fascism distracts you from the horrors of today. It’s okay to like Biblical fruit but maybe just call it what it is—-Pomegranate, dates, figs, etc. 

Our Food for Thought issue aims to tackle how we view food—as a necessity, a political pawn, a luxury, etc. If you have any newsletter-length thoughts about food, please email your draft or pitch to me at eferrero@pratt.edu for a chance to be featured in the next newsletter.

Stay well-read, stay safe, stay sexy.

XOXO,

Ella Ferrero

Managing Editor

The Prattler