Cut Of Meat Emoji

🥩 is a raw cut of red meat, usually rendered as a T-bone or porterhouse steak with visible white fat marbling. The design was approved in Unicode 10.0 (2017) under proposal L2/16-316, filling a gap left by 🍖 (cartoon bone-in) and 🍗 (poultry). Where 🍖 says 'caveman feast' and 🍗 says 'Thanksgiving,' 🥩 says 'ribeye, medium rare, I'll have a red wine.'

In texting, 🥩 is tribal. It signals one of three adjacent but distinct cultures. First, steakhouse luxury: Wagyu, Kobe, Salt Bae's $2,200 gold-leaf tomahawk, fine-dining posts on Instagram. Second, gym and protein culture: the 🥩💪🍳 stack in meal-prep content, where 'steak for breakfast' is a flex and a lifestyle. Third, and most loaded, the carnivore diet community, which grew out of low-carb and keto movements and picked up Jordan and Mikhaila Peterson's 'lion diet' (beef, salt, water) as its cause célèbre. In that lane, 🥩 isn't food. It's identity.

The emoji occasionally shows up in flirty texting as innuendo, but it's rare. 🥩 is much more likely to mean 'look at what I'm grilling' than anything suggestive.

Instagram is the steak emoji's natural home. Restaurant reviews, home-grilling posts, Brazilian churrascaria content, and wagyu unboxings all rely on it. High-end steakhouses use it in bios and captions to signal 'we take meat seriously.' Picanha, the Brazilian rump cap TasteAtlas has named the best dish in the world, drives a huge amount of 🥩 content in food and travel niches.

On TikTok, 🥩 is carnivore-diet shorthand. Search 'carnivore' on TikTok and the 🥩💪 combo is everywhere in thumbnails and captions. Before-and-after weight-loss stories, steak-cooking tutorials, the Liver King ancestral-living aesthetic (even after his 2022 steroid exposure), and the occasional vegan counter-post use 🥩 as a banner for the meat-is-medicine worldview.

On Twitter/X, 🥩 appears in culture-war threads (meat vs. plant-based), gym posts, and any quote-tweet mocking restaurant receipts. Salt Bae's $108K Dubai bill is the genre-defining example: someone posts the receipt, the internet dunks, 🥩 gets used both ironically and sincerely, and the cycle repeats.

🥩 was approved as part of Unicode 10.0 in 2017, via proposal L2/16-316. It joined a wave of 2016-2017 food additions that included 🥥 coconut, 🥦 broccoli, 🥜 peanuts, and 🥖 baguette, filling obvious gaps in the Food & Drink category.

The visible hole 🥩 filled was huge. Emoji already had 🍖 (cartoon bone-in meat, from 2010) and 🍗 (poultry leg, from 2010), but nothing that looked like a real butcher's cut. Steakhouse posts, grilling content, and carnivore-diet accounts had been defaulting to 🍖, which felt wrong. 🥩 gave them a serious-looking steak.

The timing was not an accident. The carnivore diet was gaining visibility through the low-carb, keto, and paleo communities in the mid-2010s. By 2017, Jordan Peterson had started his meat-only experiment on his daughter Mikhaila's recommendation, losing 52 pounds in seven months and evangelizing it publicly. Shortly after, Liver King (Brian Johnson) started amassing millions of followers eating raw organ meats on camera and selling an 'ancestral lifestyle' supplement line that grew to a reported $100 million in revenue before his December 2022 steroid-use confession. 🥩 was approved in the thick of this cultural moment and has been a tribal symbol for it ever since.

On the luxury side, the emoji dropped just as Salt Bae's 2017 viral salt-sprinkle video was turning Turkish butcher Nusret Gökçe into a global meme and launching his Nusr-Et steakhouse empire, where a gold-leaf tomahawk runs $2,200 and receipt screenshots routinely go viral. 🥩 rode two separate waves into the emoji set on the same day.

1. 2016[Proposal L2/16-316](https://www.emojiall.com/en/code/1F969) submitted to the Unicode Consortium, arguing that existing emoji 🍖 and 🍗 didn't cover butcher's cuts and that steakhouse, grilling, and dietary content was underserved.
2. 2017Unicode 10.0 approves U+1F969 Cut of Meat. Most platforms ship a raw T-bone or porterhouse with visible white fat marbling. The timing coincides with peak visibility for the carnivore diet and [Salt Bae's](https://www.mashed.com/1312285/what-actually-makes-salt-baes-restaurants-obscenely-expensive/) viral rise.
3. 2018Apple, Google, Samsung, and Twitter release 🥩 designs. Apple's render leans T-bone with crisp marbling; Google's is chunkier. By year-end, 🥩 is widely used in gym and steakhouse content.
4. 2020Pandemic cooking-at-home surge drives a spike in 🥩 use across Instagram and TikTok. Cast-iron steak tutorials and reverse-sear content dominate food feeds; [r/steak](https://www.reddit.com/r/steak/) reaches over a million subscribers.
5. 2022[Liver King's steroid confession](https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/i-lied-the-100-million-liver-king-admits-to-taking/440439) on December 1 exposes the gap between 'ancestral' marketing and reality. 🥩 becomes briefly ironic in carnivore circles before regaining its sincere use.
6. 2025Netflix releases [Untold: The Liver King](https://time.com/7284988/untold-the-liver-king-true-story-netflix/) in May, re-opening conversation around the carnivore influencer economy. 🥩 usage in ancestral-diet content continues to grow despite the scandal cycle.

• •The 🥩 emoji was approved in Unicode 10.0 (2017), seven years after 🍖 and 🍗. The delay existed because Unicode initially thought the cartoon meat-on-bone emoji covered all uses. Steakhouse, grilling, and diet communities lobbied for something more realistic.
• •Argentina tops the world in per-capita beef consumption at about 46 kg per person per year, roughly 100 pounds. The asado (grill) is comparable to tango and soccer as a pillar of national identity.
• •Picanha, the Brazilian rump cap, was named the best dish in the world by TasteAtlas. The global Brazilian steakhouse market was valued at $5.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $12.4 billion by 2033.
• •Japanese A5 Wagyu is graded by the Japanese Beef Association on marbling and yield. Only the top 3-5% of cattle earn the A5 designation, which requires meat to be at least 25% marbled fat. Prime cuts run $300-450 per pound.
• •A single Matsusaka cow sold for 50 million yen (~$400,000) in 2002. The record for most expensive Matsusaka was $392,000 in 1989. These prices are not retail; they're auction prices for live animals at prestige competitions.
• •Salt Bae's (Nusret Gökçe) gold-leaf tomahawk costs $2,200 at his Boston location. Viral receipts from his Dubai and Abu Dhabi restaurants have shown single-dinner bills of $108,000 and £141,000 respectively.
• •41% of Americans have criticized someone for ordering steak well-done. Medium-rare is the top restaurant preference (23%) but well-done still wins among those making under $40,000/year (31%), showing a clear income-and-doneness correlation.
• •The carnivore diet came into the mainstream largely through Mikhaila Peterson's podcast. She credits a beef-only protocol with eliminating her juvenile rheumatoid arthritis symptoms. Her father Jordan Peterson lost 52 pounds in 7 months on the same 'lion diet' (beef, salt, water).
• •Liver King (Brian Johnson) built a reported $100 million supplement empire selling an 'ancestral' lifestyle of raw organs and bull testicles. In December 2022 he admitted to spending $11,000 a month on steroids while claiming his physique came purely from diet. A Netflix documentary, Untold: The Liver King, released in May 2025, covered the scandal.
• •Beef is only the third most-produced meat globally, after pork and chicken, despite its outsized cultural weight. Pork leads because of China, chicken leads because of the US and Brazil, and beef's cultural clout comes more from Argentina, the US, and Japanese luxury.

• •Nusr-Et Steakhouse (Salt Bae's empire, 2017-present): 22 global locations where a gold-leaf tomahawk costs $2,200. Viral receipts from Dubai and Abu Dhabi have shown single-party bills north of £141,000. 🥩 is the default quote-tweet reaction emoji.
• •Liver King / Untold: The Liver King (Netflix, 2025): The Netflix documentary chronicles Brian Johnson's rise on an ancestral-diet platform and his 2022 steroid exposure. The film pushed 🥩 back into mainstream conversation in mid-2025.
• •The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast (2019-present): Mikhaila Peterson's 'lion diet' advocacy is probably the single most influential driver of the carnivore community since 2019. Her Piers Morgan appearance and TikTok clips regularly lead with 🥩💪.
• •r/steak (Reddit): Over one million members posting home-cooked steaks for rating. The subreddit's gatekeeping culture around doneness (medium-rare good, well-done roasted in the comments) is a running joke and a real standard.
• •TasteAtlas best dishes in the world (2023-present): Picanha, the Brazilian rump cap, was named the #1 dish globally, accelerating its adoption in US and Middle Eastern grilling content. 🥩 usage in Brazilian and churrascaria posts jumped after the ranking.