Eating Symbols
The first time I smelled a durian fruit, I thought I caught a whiff of someone’s dirty socks, or maybe of a dead rat. Yet in Singapore—a steam room of an island where I once lived—durians are loved by many. People there actually call it the “king of fruit.” You can see the large, heavy fruits with their spiky husks piled up high on the street stalls of neighborhoods such as Geylang, among pawnshops, sex shops, and tiny restaurants where pigeons walk across tabletops and orange-beaked birds rummage through rotting garbage. I’ve never been bold enough to actually taste a durian, not since reading in one newspaper that its flavor brings to mind either vanilla or the taste of stale baby vomit. Still, all over Singapore, durians reign. Fancy bakeries sell durian cakes, upscale restaurants lure customers with durian ice cream, and even McDonald’s introduced a durian McFlurry. What makes it possible for someone to enjoy something that to others can smell of dirty socks and taste of baby vomit? The answer is simple: culture.
What we eat and the way we eat it are only partially inscribed in our genes. We may have some preference for protein foods in our DNA, or plentiful taste buds that make us cringe when bitter veggies end up on our tongues, but that’s only part of the story—and a rather small one at that. If you’ve ever been to a food store in a distant nation, you might have found things there that you wouldn’t happily toss on your plate: donkey penises (China), ultrastinky fermented herring (Sweden), tuna eyeballs (Japan). Do people there eat these things because they have different taste buds? Because a powerful tuna eyeball industry tells them to do so through TV advertising? Not really.
If you took two people and wanted to guess what they liked to dine on, running tests on their taste buds wouldn’t be the best way to go; the easier method would be to just ask for their passports. In one large study, children from several European countries were offered apple juice of varying sweetness and crackers that were either fatty or lean and with or without added salt. Nothing predicted the kids’ taste preferences better than their place of birth—not the education of their parents, not how much TV they watched. Food, it appears, is a matter of culture. When we eat we swallow not only nutrients but also meanings and symbols. It’s our society that teaches us what’s edible and which foods should be desired. And in Singapore, one highly desirable food happens to be durian.
The lesson of what foods are good to eat begins in the mother’s womb. The flavors from a pregnant woman’s meals seep into her amniotic fluid, which the fetus swallows and tastes. Studies show, for instance, that if she eats a lot of carrots, her baby, once born, will enjoy carrot-flavored cereal more than kids whose moms didn’t go carrot crazy during pregnancy. Later, this culinary education continues on the breast. The process is similar: what the mother eats flavors her milk, and that’s what, in general, her child learns to prefer. If you don’t care for aniseed much, for example, it’s quite likely your mom didn’t eat it in your earliest days.
Then comes weaning time. Human babies, along with other baby omnivores, like rat pups, acquire tastes for the same foods the adults in their lives enjoy most. As scientists put it, their food preferences are “socially transmitted.” Since baby rats are not spoon-fed in high chairs, they learn what’s good to eat by sniffing the mouths or feces of their older companions, where the scent of food may still linger. As a result, rats develop ethnic-like “cuisines,” since two groups living in similar environments may have learned generation after generation to choose some foods over others. If a rat traveled from his home (say New York’s Grand Central subway station) to another rat enclave (Times Square station, perhaps), he likely would be quite surprised by what the others lived on. But rats and humans are not the only animals whose culinary likes and dislikes vary with culture: it’s the same with baboons, sparrows, lizards, and even fish. The foods that an animal learns to like from its parents can be quite bizarre, too. In experiments, kittens who saw their mothers munch on bananas acquired a taste for this rather unkitty food. If a child observes people around him eating hamburgers, fries, and ketchup, he will likely grow up to enjoy these particular foods, too (and he is probably American). If she grows up among lovers of mopane caterpillars, millet mush, and hippo meat, that is what she’ll prefer as an adult (and she is probably Zambian).
When it comes to liking a food, whether fried bacon or durian, even the facial expressions of the people around us are important. Studies show that if someone makes a disgusted face when a child is eating, the young one may lose his appetite. Meanwhile, a happy smile can open tightly sealed toddler lips to things that were previously considered inedible. Of course, parents often subconsciously react to foods they serve their kids. If you hate brussels sprouts, it’s hard not to wince while offering them to a child. If you love bacon, you may lick your lips with pleasure when the tiny fork cruises to your kid’s mouth. Children as well as adults, being the social creatures that we are, learn what’s yummy in social settings. We simply observe what others like and dislike and follow their lead. In Mexico, kids discover from a young age that the pain associated with chili peppers is considered a good thing, and so they start to enjoy it. We also learn to like best those foods that we eat during particularly pleasant occasions. Brian Wansink, an expert on eating habits from Cornell University, once described an example of how Asian exchange students who come to the US start seeing cookies as a comfort food. It goes like this: a Chinese, let’s say a girl, like most others in her culture, is not used to eating cookies. She moves to the US for college. She goes to parties and sees people eating cookies and having fun. She goes to more parties and sees more people eating cookies and having fun. Time passes. Parties, fun, cookies, parties, fun, cookies. Soon the girl makes a subconscious connection between fun, social life, and cookies. And then one day when she feels lonely and sad, she buys herself a pack of Oreos, trying to re-create that feeling she had at the parties. It works, and she gets hooked on cookies.
Social sharing during feasts is one of the most important reasons why meat keeps such a tight grip on us. This impulse likely dates back to when our hominin ancestors were divvying up their kills. Meat was the perfect food to share for a celebration: it came in a big package, too big for a single person or even a family to down in one go, and it spoiled if not eaten fast. It was hard to get—and still is—either because it’s difficult to hunt on a savanna or it’s difficult to hunt down enough money in your wallet to buy it. For this reason, meat is the food for feasting, so much so that in many cultures people call celebrations a “time to eat meat.” Even the word carnival comes from the Italian carnevale, meaning “good-bye meat” (as in, good-bye, see you after the fasting of Lent). Sharing food, and meat in particular, makes people feel they belong, whether it’s grilling beef burgers with neighbors (North America), roasting pork kiełbasa over a campfire with friends (Poland), or drinking a bowl of boshintang, dog soup, with family during the hottest days of summer (South Korea). That’s because we share not only the food but also the memories of fun. Like the cookies of the Chinese student, meat becomes even more valued because it gets connected to pleasure, to feelings of togetherness. No wonder then that when a vegetarian says “No thank you” to a cut of steak, dark clouds of social disapproval quickly gather. His hosts begin to think, “What do you mean, no thank you? No thank you for sharing food with us? You don’t want to be a part of our group?”
Although we learn to eat and like meat because that’s what the people around us do and have been doing for generations, because that is what our pregnant and breastfeeding mothers filled up on, and because that’s what they spoon-fed us in our toddlerhoods, meat is much more than a cultural habit. Its allure stems also from the powerful symbolism that it carries: it embodies strength, masculinity, wealth, and dominance. We eat meat in part because of the unconscious assumption that we are what we eat.
I’m standing on the packed, brownish dirt that is the floor of the Temple of Pythons in Ouidah, Benin. Paul Akakpo, my guide to West African voodoo, adjusts the large python that is wrapped, jewelry-like, around his neck. Akakpo has a remarkable knowledge of everything voodoo: not only is he a practitioner himself, he is also the nephew of a head priest of Beninese voodoo (a voodoo “pope,” Akakpo tells me). As we talk, Akakpo points to the ground, to the temple’s “floor.” I follow his gaze and shudder: there is blood under my feet.
A trail of red winds around the concrete steps of the temple and ends by a giant sacred tree, where a local woman in a Technicolor dress is holding a freshly killed chicken, smearing its warm blood on the trunk of the tree. She is feeding the spirits. The woman’s shoulders are naked, her dress starting barely at the top of her breasts. To all in the know, those naked shoulders signify she is a voodoo priestess. When she is done with the chicken, she throws its limp body on the ground and wipes her hands on a piece of cloth. She doesn’t drink the blood, not now, not when I look at her. Maybe she will later? “Blood and meat eating is a direct communion with the voodoo spirits,” Akakpo explains. “It empowers the believers with the voodoo spirits and helps them conquer their enemies.” Voodoo adepts drink the blood and eat the meat of sacrificial animals because they believe it gives them the power of the animal, its strength.
There is a reason why people believe mastering other creatures gives us their powers. Animals are dangerous and difficult to kill. Something as small as a rabbit can scratch you and inflict wounds that may putrefy. On the other hand: Do you know anyone attacked by a cabbage? Exactly. That’s why in our collective human mind (and not just the West African one) animals and blood mean strength and aggression. And since we are what we eat, as the saying goes, eating animals makes us powerful, resilient, tough. It’s not just the voodoo believers of Benin who take this literally—sometimes Americans do as well.
That’s at least what Paul Rozin, professor of cultural psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a world-class expert on human food choice, discovered in his experiments. Rozin, who in the 1970s coined the term omnivore’s dilemma, believes that culture is a powerful determinant of our culinary choices. In one of his experiments, he let a group of students read about an imaginary distant society in which people frequently dine on boars, while a second group got a similar text about a culture of turtle eaters. Afterward, when Rozin asked the students to describe a typical member of each society, the boar eaters were characterized as more aggressive than turtle eaters, faster, and more hairy. That’s a perfect example of “you are what you eat”: if you consume boars, you become boar-like.
What makes this belief even more powerful is that sometimes it really is true. If you eat a lot of carrots, the carotene in them can color your skin orange. If you eat a lot of fat, you become fat. From there it’s easy to imagine that consuming horses or bulls could make you powerful and eating lettuce could make you slack. Our language reinforces that connection. To “beef up” is to make something stronger. A “vegetable” is a severely impaired person. We have a “couch potato,” not a “couch steak.” We “veg out.” And since few of us want to be slow and weak, we would rather consume animals than vegetables. That is particularly true of men.
You may have seen this commercial while you were “vegging out” in front of the TV: a young man in a green polo shirt is waiting at the grocery checkout, when another guy, more or less his age, stands in line behind him and starts unloading his shopping cart onto the conveyor belt. The cashier scans the first guy’s groceries: tons of green stuff, some radishes, and tofu. While she beeps the stuff away, the tofu man glances at the guy behind him and takes in his shopping: red, chunky ribs, piles of some other unidentified meat. Meat, meat, and more meat. The tofu man begins to look uncomfortable, as if his shoes are too small or his collar is too tight. Then his eyes land on an advertisement for a Hummer H3. He pushes his veggie-laden cart out of the store, his face purposeful now, determined. He drives straight to a GM dealership and, without hesitation, buys himself a Hummer. As powerful music rocks in the background, the tofu guy drives away in his new freight container of a car, nibbling on a carrot. Big bright letters pop on the screen: “Restore the balance.”
What I’ve just described is a Hummer H3 spot that aired in the US in 2006. The original tag was actually “Restore your manhood”—but people complained, so it got changed. Yet the message remained pretty clear: real men eat meat, and if you don’t, you can at least boost your masculinity by driving a huge, earth-unfriendly car.
You don’t have to look far to find ads claiming that men need their meat. Domino’s Pizza did one with a similar message and so did Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, Quiznos, and TGI Fridays. In Burger King’s commercial ‘‘Manthem,’’ guys are “too hungry to settle for chick food” and need a Texas Double Whopper to “eat like a man.” In New Zealand, a campaign promoting Lion Red beer gives guys “Man Points” for doing masculine things (building a deck, fishing with pals, starting a barbecue) and negative “Man Points” for asking for directions, waxing anything that’s not a board, or cooking tofu.
Teachers of introductory sociology classes sometimes recommend their students do an experiment. Head to a restaurant on a date with the opposite sex. The guy should order veggies; the girl should ask for a steak. Now observe the waiter. In all likelihood, he will get the food all mixed up and place the meat in front of the guy. But it’s not just waiters who think of meat as masculine—college students do that, too. In another of Rozin’s studies, when asked which foods are the most “male,” University of Pennsylvania students chose steaks, hamburgers, and beef chili. The top “female food,” meanwhile, was chocolate.
The notion that meat is the food for men is nothing new, of course. One painting of Henry VIII portrayed him eating steak, while his six wives nibbled on apples, turnips, and carrots. This dichotomy—meat/male, veggies/female—was particularly pronounced during wars. If meat could make men stronger, no one needed it more than soldiers. A Tudor knight received two pounds of meat a day in provisions, while scores of his countrymen almost never ate any animal flesh at all. Even much later, during World War II, American GIs consumed 2.5 times as much meat as civilians back home. Animal protein, those in command believed, was necessary for superior frontline performance. Like the West African voodoo practitioners, the American war planners thought that meat eating could help conquer the enemy. If you were to fight like a lion, you had to eat like a lion, too.
To find out the roots of this belief, it’s worth asking who it was that most likely started the urban legend (or rather savanna legend) that eating meat makes you assimilate the powers of the animal. The answer, most likely, is that men did. They were the ones who brought home the rare treat of a mammoth sirloin or a giraffe filet mignon. They were the ones who decided how to divide the meat and who could receive a share. They gathered around campfires (as soon as they were invented, that is), just as they gather around $2,000 stainless-steel gas grills today, and talked politics. Hunting and eating meat reinforced gender inequality. To make sure that women didn’t get the powers of animals from their meat or challenge the position of men as providers of that rare but nutritious food, taboos were put in place. Even today, most meat taboos are directed at women. Some African tribes, for example, forbid them to consume chicken, while others, like Tanzania’s Hadza, reserve the fattiest portions of game for men. If a woman dares steal a bite, she risks rape or even death. Such taboos, of course, helped men secure the stomach-filling bits for themselves.
Generation after generation, meat’s tie to masculine identity was reinforced, becoming an expression of a patriarchal world. What’s more, sex got added to the mix. Today some people may jokingly celebrate “National Steak and Blow Job Day” on March 14 (and yes, it’s real), but in the past, the connection between the consumption of animal flesh and lovemaking was taken far more seriously. In Victorian times, meat was believed to drive lust, and schoolboys were advised to give up eating it so that they would stop masturbating. Animal flesh was thought to be “too strong” for pregnant women and to lead young girls to nymphomania. The irony is, recent scientific data demonstrates that the opposite may be true and that meat may not be the sexual tonic that our ancestors have claimed. Research shows that frequent intake of meat may negatively affect semen quality (which also casts a shadow on the premise that “meat is for real men”). What’s more, if a guy’s mother frequently ate beef when she was pregnant with him, as an adult he may have a lower sperm concentration than the sons of less beef-loving women.
Why would meat and sex go together at all, though? According to Carol J. Adams, our patriarchal society has forged that connection. A feminist, a writer, and, as she calls herself, “an activist immersed in theory,” Adams became famous after the publication of her book The Sexual Politics of Meat back in 1990. She stepped on many toes with that book. The British Sunday Telegraph joked that it was actually written by “a male academic emigré from Eastern Europe, who poses as a madwoman.” Adams is not an academic, nor a male Eastern European. She is also far from mad. When I call her for an interview, she recommends I turn on a recorder: “I speak fast,” she warns me. And it’s true. She has a lot to tell me, her thoughts flowing one into another.
Adams believes that in a patriarchal world both animals and women are treated not as subjects but as objects. For animals, that often means they end up eaten; for women, that means they are second-class citizens who also sometimes get sexually “consumed” against their wills. Adams explains: “Meat eating benefits from objectification in a way similar to sexual violence because you don’t see the other being as a living, breathing individual.” Through the distance that objectification provides, men are taught to look down on women, and everyone is taught to stay hooked on meat. One survey of one hundred nontechnological cultures found that the more a tribe bases its diet on animal products, the less power women hold. Also, in an interesting twist, the more meat is consumed in a society, the more distance fathers keep from their infants. The stereotypical twenty-first century BabyBjörn-wearing father (who also likely took leave from work to stay home with the baby) may be a vegetarian, too.
Yet don’t let the apparent ubiquity of BabyBjörn-wearing, tofu-loving fathers fool you. As Adams tells me, the connection among sex, meat, and men has only gotten stronger since she has published her book. “Back in the ’80s we had some success with feminism, the animal rights movement was beginning to strengthen, and I felt that maybe I’ll finish my book just in time to be commenting on something that was passing away,” she says. But it didn’t pass away. Today, TV ads persuade men that they need meat to be masculine—and so does the popular press. The lifestyle magazine Men’s Health, which has a US circulation of 1.65 million, is particularly vocal about this. A Men’s Health ideal guy eats tons of red meat. “Vegetables are for girls . . . If your instincts tell you following a vegetarian diet isn’t manly, you’re right,” stated one article.
So where does this outpouring of meat-eating machismo come from? Adams tells me that traditional masculinity is threatened nowadays by feminism, the gay movement, metrosexuality, and all the BabyBjörn-wearing carrot-munching fathers of the world. Old-school masculinity needs to be reaffirmed, and one way to do this is to connect it once again with eating bloody slabs of animal flesh, even if that flesh didn’t require any skills or strength to kill and came in a plastic wrap from a supermarket. Twenty-first-century men may feel they are losing their power and dominance, and they want it back. Adams is not alone in this belief. Other researchers, too, point to this “crisis of masculinity” and see eating meat as a symbol of returning to manhood’s roots. On the other hand, to reject meat is to reject the mainstream notions of masculinity and, in a way, patriarchal society itself. Men who do this risk ridicule and opposition from the other, steak-loving males. As Adams wrote in her book: “They are opting for women’s food. How dare they?” Meanwhile, for women, giving up meat can be a way to separate themselves from a traditional, male-dominated society in which both women and animals are objectified. That is likely why many nineteenth-century suffragists were vegetarian, and why today Adams advocates that feminism and vegetarianism should go hand in hand and help each other out. On the flip side, for some women, eating bloody roasts may be a stand-in for joining the ranks of the powerful (think dining on a medium-rare steak in one of Washington, DC’s ubiquitous steak houses). If they can’t have the whole world, they at least want a bite. That makes perfect sense also because meat symbolizes power over the poor, underprivileged masses. From our earliest days on the Paleolithic savanna, when our ancestors were showing off their kills to form alliances and gain social position, meat has always stood for luxury and for riches.
It was November 1922 when an archaeologist named Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, which had lain undisturbed in the scorchingly hot Egyptian sands for over three thousand years. Once Carter made a small hole in the blocked doorway of the tomb’s antechamber, he squinted inside. Among the first things he spotted were forty-eight whitewashed, wooden cases. As he soon learned, they were full of meat. But the various joints of beef and poultry weren’t just dumped into the boxes straight from the butcher’s: if they had been, they would have spoiled into a stinky mess pretty fast. Instead, they were carefully treated with balms, in a manner similar to that of mummies. As of today, archaeologists have found hundreds of such ancient “meat mummies”—carefully preserved meat that high-status Egyptians took with them to the afterlife. Already back then, it appears, meat was a symbol of wealth, both in this life and in the netherworld.
For centuries, animal flesh was a perfect indicator of how rich someone was. To be a symbol of wealth, an object has to be rare and difficult to obtain. Think Patek Philippe watches versus T-shirts from Walmart. Maybe you don’t have to risk your life chasing down a fancy watch on a savanna, but if you are an average American, you would have to spend many hours at work to earn the thousands of dollars necessary to pay for it. Wealthy people use Patek Philippe watches and other expensive things to set themselves apart from the masses. Such items need to be pricey and hard to obtain. One joke I’ve recently heard sums it up pretty well: A Russian oligarch meets another Russian oligarch at a party and admires his tie. “Silk?” he asks. “Silk,” nods the other. “How much did you pay?” “$5,000,” says the tie’s owner. “Really? That’s a bad deal,” the other guy shakes his head. “I’ve seen exactly the same tie in a boutique in Moscow. You could have easily gotten it for $10,000!”
In the past, meat used to be like those silk ties—and still is in many parts of the world. It was desired because it was hard to get and expensive. Psychological experiments show that if shop owners advertise that something is available “only today!” or that there are “only ten left!,” people will want that thing more, even if they don’t really need it. In medieval Europe, turnips, cabbage, and beetroots were common—so there wasn’t much reason to crave them. Meat, on the other hand, was such a rare treat that peasants barely ever ate it. Meanwhile, the aristocracy could down as much as three pounds per person per day. When Henry IV, the king of England, married Joan of Navarre in 1403, their wedding feast was loaded with meats. There was a boar’s head, pheasants, heron, “calves foot jelly with white wine and vinegar,” stuffed suckling pigs, “peacocks served in their plumage,” cranes, quails, young rabbits, and rissoles of pork roasted on a spit. The kings and queens of Europe, just like the rest of the aristocracy, ate hardly any fruits and vegetables. One British “shopping” list for an elite dinner party of fifty included thirty-six chickens, nine rabbits, four geese, one swan, two beef rumps, six quails, bacon and fifty eggs, some spices, and little else. As for spices, people in medieval Europe didn’t use them to cover the taste of animal flesh gone bad. That’s a myth. Back then if you could afford spices, that meant you could afford fresh meat and could throw out whatever got spoiled. Spices were just another indicator of wealth that the masses couldn’t dream of affording.
Some animals were a status symbol even before they became meat. Take cattle. Owning a cow that gave you milk or an ox that ploughed the fields (which could be eaten once they got too old to work) was extremely valuable, so much so that in several European languages the word cattle is synonymous with “capital.” In Sanskrit, the word for battle (gavisti) basically means “desire for cattle.” The more cows and oxen you could afford to slaughter—to waste, in a way—the more powerful it meant you were. Killing a cow for a feast to share with others showed you were rich, that you’d “made it.” Even today in many African or Latin American cultures, wealth is measured by how many head of cattle one owns. I experienced this personally when in my early twenties I traveled to Tanzania with my stepfather. One day when we were strolling through a market, a local man approached us. He took my stepfather to the side and in all seriousness offered him four cows in exchange for my hand in marriage. Four cows was a generous offer, he said, which meant he was wealthy enough to take a European wife. The offer wasn’t accepted (of course), but the equation—wealthy Tanzanian equals lots of cows—stuck in my mind.
Although modern Westerners are rather unlikely to show off their affluence by the amount of cattle they own (unless they are farmers or meat industry magnates) or by the number of boars’ heads they serve at a party, they may try to impress others by the price tags of their grills. We may like grilling because of the way it reminds us of cozy Paleolithic campfires or because the Maillard reaction boosts the flavors of broiled meats, but that’s just part of the story. Our penchant for roasting and the way we value it over boiling once again goes back to the symbolism of meat as the food for the rich and powerful. The thing is, you can’t really roast a low-quality cut from an old milked-out cow. It won’t be any good—just chewy and tough. To make such meat edible, you’d have to stew it for a long time. Boiling not only makes it possible to dine on inferior cuts, but it also preserves juices, making this particular cooking method more economical. It’s a good way to prepare salted meats, too, or ones that are not exactly fresh. Ergo, boiling is perfect for the poor and the hungry. For roasting you need young animals and premium cuts. This gave the aristocracy another opportunity for displaying their wealth: look, we can afford to roast all these freshly killed, tender younglings. The poor could spare meat to roast only on special occasions. Thus grilling became associated with wealth and with celebrations, and that is also why grilling is for guys and stooping over a pot of stew is for women—the first one is prestigious, the second one is not.
The association with wealth is also one of the reasons why Americans are so into beef and not so much into pork. First, many settlers came from Great Britain, where beef was a well-established food for the mighty and powerful. To be just like the nobility back home, the new Americans wanted steaks. Second, pork was considered a meat for the poor. Hogs were cheap to raise: they could basically feed themselves by eating garbage off the streets, which they commonly did. Packs of swine roamed the American cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, well into the nineteenth century. Pork was easier to preserve than beef, too, which meant that before the advent of refrigerators, the lower classes often relied on salted, barreled pig meat to survive winters. Up until the early twentieth century, it was pork that fed America. But it was expensive, rare, and tough-to-cook beef that people craved—precisely because it was expensive, rare, and tough to cook. That’s human psychology 101.
Just as it has long symbolized power over women and over the poorer members of society, meat has also long stood for power over other, less affluent nations. Food is a potent marker of ethnic identity. When immigrants move to a new country, they may start speaking the new language and pack away their traditional clothes in the attic to gather dust, but the foods of home are among the last things to go. One of my Singaporean friends living in France has so much Asian chow stashed under her bed she could survive World War III living on it (thankfully, she doesn’t have any durians in her stock). Food is commonly used for setting nations apart: we call the Germans “krauts” and the French “frogs.” The idea that ethnic cuisine heavy in meat makes for better citizens became popular in the nineteenth century. George Miller Beard, a physician quite well-known back then in America, wrote eloquently on the subject: “Savages who feed on poor food are poor savages, and intellectually far inferior to the beef-eaters of any race. . . . The rice-eating Hindoo and Chinese and the potato-eating Irish peasant are kept in subjection by the well-fed English.” This belief that a meat-eating nation equals a better nation held strong in the West until the mid-twentieth century. In a book published in 1939 by Swift & Company (a meatpacking corporation), that point was made quite clear: “We know meat-eating races have been and are leaders in the progress made by mankind in its upward struggle through the ages.” Even after the war, a textbook for butchery students hailed that “the virile Australian race is a typical example of heavy meat-eaters.” Once again, to eat meat is to be powerful. This is a variation on the “you are what you eat” theme and on the “we are better than you because we can afford something as expensive as meat” theme. Meanwhile, by rejecting meat a vegetarian rejects not only his “tribe” at the table but also often, in a way, his whole nation. The equation of a Briton as an eater of beef was already in place in 1542, when Andrew Boorde recommended beef as the perfect food for Englishmen in his guidebook Dyetary. On one British ship, the Titanic, dinner was announced by the sounds of “The Roast Beef of Old England,” and the personification of UK is the beef-loving John Bull. Now imagine you are English and you stop eating beef. That’s a lot of heritage to reject, a lot of national identity to part with. If everyone in Great Britain switched to plant-based diets, should the country’s personification be renamed John Veggie?
In the US, meat eating is also part of the national identity. The cowboys conquering the frontier, and the settlers painstakingly moving their cattle west—that’s about beef, too. Give up meat, and the cowboy dream can no longer be 100 percent yours.
If you read any contemporary book on the sociology of food, there is a pretty good chance that in a chapter dealing with meat one work will be quoted: Meat: A Natural Symbol by Nick Fiddes. Fiddes, a Scottish anthropologist who gave up academia to trade in kilts and tartans, put forward another theory why we find meat so tempting: it symbolizes our power over nature. To chew and to swallow other highly evolved organisms, ones that can feel and fight and bleed, is to show our human superiority. We can kill you. We can eat you. The stronger the opponent, the more prestige in depriving him of life (hunting lions in Africa is prestigious; harvesting cabbage in a field—not so much). Fiddes argues—and many sociologists agree with him—that we value meat not in spite of hurting other creatures but precisely because it involves hurting other creatures. If carrots suffered more when killed and fought for their lives with a bit more might, maybe vegetarian diets would carry higher status than they do now. As it is, only butchering animals can prove to the rest of nature what powerful creatures we humans are. The true kings of the jungle.
With such potent symbolism behind it, no wonder we stay hooked on meat. We humans like power, and that’s precisely what meat stands for. Because it is dangerous to kill, hard to obtain, and expensive, animal flesh has come to represent power over women, over the poor, over nature, over other nations. From the voodoo practitioners of Benin to University of Pennsylvania students, we believe that by ingesting meat we somehow absorb the properties of the animal. To stop eating flesh means to risk becoming veggie-like, as fast as a cabbage and as mighty as a head of lettuce (you are what you eat, after all). If you are a man, giving up steaks could mean giving up on a patriarchal society with rich guys at the top and impoverished women at the bottom. It could mean you would become less masculine, no longer one of the “real men.” And recent scientific studies confirm that those of us who hold authoritarian beliefs, who think social hierarchy is important, who seek wealth and power and support human dominance over nature, eat more meat than those who stand against inequality.
But even if meat wasn’t marinated in all that powerful symbolism, it would still be hard to give up because our food habits get perpetuated generation after generation—and often without much thought. We learn our culinary likes and dislikes in the wombs of our mothers and, later, on their breasts. As children, we observe the people around us and see the pleasure of consuming animals reflected in their faces, and we learn that meat is good. Really, really good. Acquired early and reinforced daily by the culture in which we live, that’s a difficult lesson to unlearn, so difficult, in fact, that over the centuries scores of vegetarian leaders have failed to convince the masses to follow their meatless ways. Still, had the winds of history blown just right, the most vocal of them may have succeeded—if only they had been a bit less radical and a bit less eccentric and had shown better appreciation of the culinary arts.