Eating Beef and Masculinity, By John Steel

Beef eating in all cultures that have beef (e.g. Eskimos do not but eat the meat of various other creatures), has been historically associated with masculinity. Men were the principal hunters in pre-modern times. Thus, getting the meat was strongly associated with manhood, because animals that are hunted do not want to be eaten and violently resist, and this require strength and risking life and limb. In Africa, to take but one example, boys had an initiation test for manhood by killing a lion, which was not left to rot, but which was eaten.

Men in modern society eat beef at a much greater amount than women, and that is where the climate change issue comes in; beef has a carbon footprint, you know. Cows fart and all that. I have long suspected that the attack upon the beef industry by the climate change fanatics was motivated by a feminist attack upon manhood.

Here is some material from NPR.org, which confirms this. They are quite forward that beef eating is both an ecological issue, and a gender one as well. All the more reason to pile into juicy steaks as long as we can.

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/14/nx-s1-5003066/beef-climate-change-american-men-masculinity

"Men and boys see messages all the time that say eating beef is a thing men do, and statistics bear this out, says Diego Rose, nutrition program director at Tulane University. "Whenever we've looked at the question of gender, we've seen that," Rose says. "Men eat greater amounts of beef than women."

Now Rose and other researchers think this fact — that men eat more beef — could be important to a key climate solution puzzle.

Beef has a bigger overall planet-heating impact than any other food, scientists say. Demand for beef drives deforestation in places like the Amazon rainforest. Cattle release powerful greenhouse gas emissions that heat the planet. "If you want to reduce emissions, it's all about the beef," says Tim Searchinger, senior research scholar at Princeton University and technical director of the agriculture and forestry program at the World Resources Institute.

Getting people to eat less beef could quickly make a large dent in climate pollution. Rose's research finds that subbing poultry for beef in a meal can cut a person's daily dietary carbon footprint by about half. Food and climate researchers have long grappled with how to get people to shift diets toward less beef. And now they are thinking about the problem through the lens of gender. But there are challenges to shifting diets toward less beef, from misinformation about soy and protein, to powerful societal pressures and messaging for men to eat beef.

"Messaging to men about beef absolutely matters," says Jan Dutkiewicz, professor of political science at the Pratt Institute. "If there's a large portion of men out there who are being programmed to not just eat more meat, but to be completely resistant to any messages about meat reduction," he says, "that's a real problem."