Medium rare steak, shrimp on the barbie, chain eating roasts. Let’s face it, meat is a man thing, right? Alice Wade explores why we think meaty means masculine and how harmful this narrative can be for our health, environment and for gender equality

Steak, raw eggs, ultra spicy wings, and probably not a lot of greenery. These are all hallmark ingredients of a typical ‘masculine diet’. Big big bros, greasy grills and mountains of meat. It’s in our adverts, it’s in our movies and it’s especially in our BBQ enthusiast fathers. We saw it recently with the ‘boy dinner’ TikTok trend where young men took to social media to reveal their rather horrifying meals of ground beef, sausages and some which even show just a pint of beer and a plate stacked with cigarettes. 

And we saw it in an even more visceral light when J*rdan Pet*rson told everyone to cut greens for grass-fed beef and embrace a completely carnivorous diet. Hashtag ‘carnivore diet’ has 1.2 billion views on TikTok and a quick scroll will reveal that the trend is predominantly a man thing. But why are meat and masculinity  so interwoven and what impact does it have on us?

Dr. Martha Tara Lee, relationship counsellor and clinical sexologist, explains that there are several reasons why meat eating is so closely tied to manliness. “Societal expectations of masculinity often include the idea that men should consume large portions of meat, be strong and muscular, and avoid "feminine" foods like salads or vegetarian options. These cultural norms can influence men to prioritise certain types of foods.”

Where diets rich in vegetables are often viewed as being inherently “feminine”, men are shown to be more reluctant to embrace vegetarian options. A recent study showed that when certain vegan dishes were remarketed as masculine (think ‘beast burger’ and ‘wow-factor burger’), men showed a more positive attitude to vegan foods. Meanwhile, meals consisting of a vegan burger, salad, carbonara, and goulash were rated as more suitable for women than men. And adding words like “smokey” and “hardy” brought out higher ratings for food considered masculine over the feminine “creamy” and “delicious”.

But this connection between meat and masculinity isn’t new. According to dietician and nutritionist Yelena Wheeler, the systemic norms relating to masculinity are a reflection of pre-historic hunter-gather times “where men were mostly considered the hunters, and so they brought back meat back to the tribe,” while women collected plants to eat.

While this stretches back to a time long before any of us could conceptualise supersizing a Big Mac, Wheeler says the anthropological effect of this is still prevalent. For example, “women can decipher more colour than men, because of the gatherer society, and how they would pick different berries, and know which ones are poisonous, which ones weren't.”

But despite the evidence that patriarchal communities did exist in hunter-gatherer times, this isn't as representative of the truth as cultural predispositions about men and meat might make it out to be. In fact, there were many matriarchal societies where women took the lead on sourcing meat. One recent study found that in 79 per cent of the communities studied, women were hunting. And they were resourceful too. Women were found to have toolkits and even favoured certain weapons for hunting. Grandmas were even thought to be some of the tribe's best hunters.

Emily Contois, lecturer at Tulsa University and author of Diner, Dudes and Diets says the way our society has come to view consumption – and the connection between meat and masculinity – is largely a selective choice from our culture.

“We project our own contemporary onto different historical moments of their gendered ideas onto that far, far past that deep past.”

She says: “There are no actually gendered foods, there are just foods. But our culture really strongly attaches these gendered ideas to particular ingredients, flavours, portion sizes, appetites, all these pieces of food.”

According to Contois, the attachment of gender norms onto different people is so pervasive because of its link to us as biological beings. “We literally ingest food, it becomes part of our bodies, it becomes a part of our physiology, it becomes a part of the science that makes us up. And so there's a tension there. That food does become part of us.”

Alongside these misconceptions and subsequent cultural beliefs is the way in which food is sold to us. “Advertising has played a big role in it,” says Wheeler.

“Anytime you see protein shakes or protein powders, it's always big beefy guys drinking the shakes and everything tends to be big, supersized, or big tough red meat. ”

It’s by the nature of this branding that consumers take on messages about what they are and aren’t to eat. “The fonts you use, the colours, the imagery and the celebrity endorsements, all these things are gendered. They’re trying to communicate that this is for men, this is for women,” explains Contois.

Lest we forget the brazenness of the Yorkie bar which in 2001 was advertised alongside the slogan, “Five big chunks of masculine chocolate. Yorkie... It's not for girls." It took 10 years for Nestle to drop the slogan after dismissing numerous complaints of sexism.

“Even when brands are trying to have a sort of more inclusive message, even when they're trying to be like ‘men to do this too’, it still affirms and sort of reinforces the categories of feminine and masculine as we imagine them.” And when men do follow vegan diets, they do so not because they assimilate with feminine tropes of kale-eating green juice bunnies, but because they have repurposed the stereotypes themselves to be more masculine. 

The 2018 Netflix documentary, The Game Changer, which shows just how big and blokey veganism can be, was executively produced by Arnold Schwarzenegger and follows several endurance runners and UFC fighter James Wilks. By repackaging veganism as something that builds strength, power, and endurance, men give themselves permission to engage in a lifestyle previously associated with feminist hippies and Kourtney Kardashian. 

The prowess of masculinity is still at large but has just switched lanes. “They still manage to uphold a lot of the existing norms of masculinity and of patriarchy as they do it. They'll say they're doing it because they have greater strength and they have better sex performance,” says Contois.

But while men continue to conflate masculinity with eating meat, they ignore detrimental health and environmental impacts. While it is true that people with higher muscle mass do need more protein and calories to sustain themselves - since muscle burns more - this needn’t come from bucket loads of beef. 

As Wheeler says, “eating red meat to be more manly is detrimental to the cardiovascular health of men”.

“This whole notion that you have to eat high protein, high biological value foods (which tend to be more animal-based) to improve endurance, and help muscles grow is the reason why that is a detriment.”

“Cholesterol is found only in animal products so if we are promoting the consumption of animal products to maintain big muscles and things like that, then more cholesterol is being ingested by men, which does adversely affect their cardiovascular health.”

And this is without considering the environmental impacts of the meat industry which accounts for 60% of greenhouse gases. A recent study found that the diet of the average British male produces 40% more carbon emissions than that of females, largely due to increased meat consumption. 

If it’s masculine to wreck the planet and increase your risk of heart disease, so be it. But we’re far enough away from hunter-gatherer times in all other aspects of our society that it’s about time we question the real reason masculinity is so tied up with consuming meat.

Is there really an ancestral pull to being a carnivore? There might have been hundreds of years ago, but in the age of an array of plant based meats, protein powders and a million and one ways to meet your daily nutritional quota, we can also reframe the gendering of our foods, and encourage everyone to take the option that suits us as individuals.