If you want to fight the patriarchy, go vegetarian. At least, that’s what Penn State sociology professor Anne DeLessio-Parson says will do the trick. Her article in “Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography” says that eating meat is a form of “hegemonic masculinity.”
To investigate the connection between meat and masculinity, DeLessio-Parson conducted 23 interviews of men and women in Argentina. The country’s notoriously meat-heavy food culture made it a uniquely fitting place to study. DeLessio-Parson sees vegetarianism as a form of social rebellion.
She writes, “Women, for example, assert authority over their diets; men embody rejection of the meat-masculinity nexus by adopting a worldview that also rejects sexism and racism. I contend that in such a context, we cannot separate the ways people ‘do vegetarianism’ from how they ‘do gender.’”
Let’s start with the obvious: There is no magic diet that cures sexism and racism. (If only!) What’s more, the study itself hinges on a gender-based assumption: Meat is a manly food, ergo refusing to eat meat is a rejection of manliness.
For a project that tries so hard to be #woke, it commits the mortal progressive sin of assuming someone’s gender. Whose? The meat’s. It’s not entirely fair to consider meat a masculine food, when both male and female chickens, cows, and pigs eventually become meat. How many poor, defenseless, Argentinian steaks did DeLessio-Parson misgender while she was conducting the study?
The entire notion of gendering food is patently absurd. It’s impossible to tell the difference between meat from male animals and meat from female ones. The best the average consumer can do is guess. As for vegetables, well, those are inanimate objects, and they’re genderless. The counterpart to masculine is feminine, not inanimate.
Yet, we still tend to think of some foods as manly and others as girly. Yogurt is chief among the “girly” foods, not because of any inherent characteristic, but because of years of marketing it to women. And just as soon as whipped delight key lime zero fat yogurt concoctions became The Official Food of Women™, food companies realized they were missing out on the male half of the market. Enter “brogurt,” GrubStreet’s term for yogurt packaged and marketed to men. This whole time, we all could have been eating the same yogurt, but instead, we get silly by pandering yogurt.
Likewise, we think of salad as a feminine food because of the quasi-insane marketing around salad and its accessories. “Women laughing alone with salad” is a meme because of how ubiquitous and nonsensical it is. Meanwhile, I dare anyone to find marketing for chicken wings that is not explicitly directed at men. Sports bars know their audience. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s wrong to think a woman who eats wings is behaving in a masculine way. Wings themselves aren’t made “manly” simply because a lot of men like them.
For now, whether we like it or not, food is gendered in Western culture. University of Manitoba assistant professor Luke Zhu boiled it down (pun totally intended) to this: we think of healthy food as what women should eat, and unhealthy food as what men consume. He discovered this by asking 93 adults to label common foods as masculine or feminine.
No man should be embarrassed to order a salad, nor should a woman feel intimidated if he eats a steak. We can’t pick and choose our palates – otherwise, I’d crave broccoli instead of dark chocolate – but we should not pretend that what a person likes or dislikes is determined by gender.
Angela Morabito (@AngelaLMorabito) writes about politics, media, ethics, and culture. She holds both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from Georgetown University and has appeared on “On the Record with Greta van Susteren” as well as “Cavuto: Coast to Coast.”
