Of Men And Meat

If you’re wondering if we gender food, just google “man eating.” You’ll find dudes shoving burgers down their throats. Now google “woman eating.” Salads abound. From these stock images, one would think that women pretty much eat only cubes of fruit and iceberg lettuce while laughing into their forks.

On one level, these search results might seem more indicative of female diet culture than of men’s diets; we’re more likely to view a diet of solely salad as a trendy fad than we would a diet of largely meat. That’s because we already assume that eating massive quantities of meat is the norm. I mean, the average American ate 198 pounds of meat in the year 2014 compared to the world average of about 91 pounds. We are a meat-centric society and, despite the growing number of very vocal plant-based folk, meat consumption is soaring (annual meat consumption per person in the U.S. was predicted to be to 222 pounds for the year of 2018). America is increasingly meat-obsessed, so why aren’t both women and men on Google Images chowing down steaks? Why is meat so connected to men?

We could, of course, approach it from a naïve “first humans” perspective: men are hunters, women are gatherers. But even if that perspective is anthropologically accurate, it’s strange that the association has lived on, considering the only spears most men wield now are the sticks inside their corn dogs. According to a study done by the Vegan Society, 63%  of vegans identify as female, while 37% identify as male. This divide is slightly more even but still apparent in vegetarians, with 41% of vegetarians in the U.S. identifying as male. Men aren’t hunting animals as a means to survive anymore, but there still seems to be an inextricable link between meat consumption and masculinity.

We seem to think that meat upholds this idealized conception of manhood, but in today’s capitalist world, this sentiment has only allowed men to become prey for meat corporations. Take Burger King’s “I Am Man” commercial from 2007: men taking to the streets and refusing to “settle for chick food.” The commercial ends with the statement “Eat like a man, man.” The message is that maleness is predicated on consuming meat manufactured by a corporation (Burger King). In the same way that beauty narratives tell women they need x product to be truly beautiful, our society has posed meat consumption as something integral to manhood. It also sets up yet another way to pit women against one another, as some women use misogynist food narratives to their favor by asserting they’re not like a “typical woman.” The girl who gets a burger on the first date is a cool, one-of-the-guys kind of girl, while the girl who eats a salad is overly concerned with her figure or too girly. If there’s anything more American than meat, it’s misogyny!

I wanted to see what masculine people had to say about meat. Did they notice the emphasis on meat eating in America, or was I driving myself crazy over nothing? To George, who I knew in high school and struggle to call a man rather than a boy, “meat means protein and gains. That’s about all that comes to mind.” From what I gathered during our brief conversation, George seems to work out a lot now, which was why he described himself as “particularly masculine.” He and his frat brothers apparently all eat a lot of meat and work out together; to them, the protein they get from meat translates directly into masculine “gains” and enormous pulsing man muscles. Meat means gains, gains mean masculinity, so by transitive property of frattiness, meat means … masculinity, I guess.

Although George’s brief, no-nonsense answers were helpful, I was able to pull a lot more out of my friend Joe. He pointed out that “when male-identifying people grow up, we learn that eating meat makes you strong and tough.” Joe also noticed a lot of coded meat messages growing up, like the “associations you see on TV and commercials with meat and ‘manliness’ and being a ‘big tough man’” or how “eating my first Big Mac definitely felt like a weird male rite of passage.”

Joe and another former high school classmate of mine, Patrick*, also noticed the ways in which meat-related slang is tied to masculinity. There are a lot of typically masculine meat-related idioms: two people in a fight have “beef.” If you “beat your meat” you’re masturbating a penis; if you get wild you’re “going ham”; the list goes on and on. Joe and Patrick recalled a few more good ones, like “sausage fest” and “beef up.” Joe got on a roll once he started, sending me multiple messages:

1:39 PM: “Choke the chicken” as a euphemism for masturbation/
3:22 PM: I’ve also heard a woman’s butt referred to as “booty meat.”
9:35 PM: I just remembered the term “meathead,” I hear that a lot to refer to a muscular male who is unintelligent.

So yeah, there’s a lot of slang, although Patrick told me, “I’ve always thought that meat as a euphemism for dick was kind of unsettling, because meat is something that gets bitten off chewed and digested and I want exactly none of that associated with my dick.” I was unsettled by something else: when we associate meat with the penis and muscle, where does that leave vegetarian and vegan men? Are they stripped of “manhood” because of their dietary choices? Can you be manly without meat?

There’s increasing evidence that you can. Notable “manly” vegans include famed quarterback and activist Colin Kaepernick, “Jackass” stuntman Steve-O, and NFL star Tony Gonzalez. If male athletes are beefing up without beef, then how are they asserting their masculinity outside of our consumer emphasis that meat is male? I asked professional vegan fitness trainer Korin Sutton. Korin isn’t just fit; he’s built. A recent photo he posted on Instagram claims he has only 5% body fat, and that’s not hard to believe. He thinks that men eat more meat than women only because they’re raised to believe that men eat more meat, thus creating a cycle where men eat meat to uphold a norm. Since going vegan, Sutton says he’s “glad that my mindset has changed and realized that food has no gender roles.” You don’t have to be a typical “man” to fall prey to our society’s fixation on meat. Whether you’re a little masculine or a lot masculine, you’re still subject to masculinity standards.

But where does this association become fuel for toxic masculinity and male aggression? Considering that few people kill the food they eat, men are more likely hunting for Tyson coupons than hunting for wooly mammoths. But all it takes is a glance at the news to confirm that male aggression is alive and well. To be clear, I’m not blaming meat for this; male violence has been excused and upheld by our society for hundreds of years, and it’s not as if plant-based men are removed from that structure. Male aggression isn’t based on meat, but dominance; the same dominance that meat consumption relies on.

Is the problem meat itself, or how we eat it? If we changed the way we consume meat, then maybe some of those man/beast dichotomies would start to fall apart. If we ignore the way food informs our decisions and attitudes, we’re also ignoring how it perpetuates toxic ideals in our culture.

For a country so obsessed with eating, we don’t seem to actually think about food much. We’re constantly inundated with food advertisements and Tasty videos and pictures on Instagram, but we fail to seriously acknowledge issues like the obesity epidemic or cardiac arrest-related deaths or eating disorders. We cling to labels like “free-range” or “cage-free” without learning what that really means, or fixate on “clean” or “cruelty-free” eating. The ethical food movement may urge us to stop eating so much meat, but it is still wrapped up in the stereotypes that characterize the way we masculinize meat. Labeling some foods as “clean” implies others are “dirty”, which is classist, shame-y, and dangerous.

Once we use our food as a way to inform and fill out our identities, it becomes a fixed element in our lifestyle. Treating foods as central to our identity makes sense when it comes to cultural foods and ethnic culinary traditions, but using meat-eating to boost our identity in terms of fitness or gender or sexuality by over-emphasizing it as a necessary staple is not sustainable. Not only have we made it normal to eat way too much meat and emasculating for men who refuse to do so, we’ve tossed out the habit of an incredibly varied and ever-changing diet that our bodies need to thrive.

We’ve twisted one of the most basic parts of being human into a way we abuse ourselves and others. If we can’t examine what sustains us physically, how the hell are we supposed to examine what sustains us mentally, emotionally, or spiritually? Taking a closer look at not just what we eat, but how we eat and why we eat it, is crucial to living that Socratic examined life.

So how do we convince people to pay attention to what they eat without conflating certain foods with certain characteristics in a way that upholds the same toxic standards that pit people against each other and the planet?

I don’t know, but it’s certainly something to chew on.

 

Photos by Alexa Fahlman.