Beef, Bullshit And All-American Testosterone - Why White-Wingers Whine About Meat

In April 2021, a Daily Mail article claiming that Joe Biden planned to limit beef consumption to 4lb a year per person to meet environmental targets went viral. Though it was totally false, it sparked a chorus among rightwingers that Democrats “want to take away your hamburgers”. For many on the right, beef is a hot-button issue. The Canadian pop psychologist Jordan Peterson – who’s been called “custodian of the patriarchy” by the New Yorker – is an adherent of carnivore diets. Joe Rogan, more recently in the news for agreeing with the notorious misogynist Andrew Tate, has himself promoted “the Lion Diet”, a carnivore approach that eschews even dairy in favor of water, salt, and meat from ruminant animals. This way of eating has been gaining traction on social media, where shirtless men proudly display their meals of steak, grassfed-cow butter, and duck eggs.

That these men believe in prescribed gender roles and all-American tradition is no coincidence. “Recent scientific studies confirm that those of us who hold authoritarian beliefs … who seek wealth and power and support human dominance over nature, eat more meat than those who stand against inequality,” writes Marta Zaraska in her book Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat.

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Beef’s modern market dominance was also manufactured. The meat industry’s marketing campaigns – including 80s and 90s advertising slogans such as “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner”, spoken by strong male voices – have long been funded by commodity checkoff programs that are paid into by farmers, often to the benefit of massive manufacturers and the detriment of small ones. The federal government’s annual subsidies of meat and animal products amount to $38bn. Eating animal products for breakfast, lunch, and dinner is overconsumption that would have been unthinkable to previous generations, and it has been driven by marketing and industrial farming.

Despite the Daily Mail’s claims, the industry is not under attack – the Democrats’ center-right policies have never dared challenge the industrial meat and dairy’s lobbyists. Biden has no real plans to reduce beef consumption – though it is true that people in the US are eating a little less beef, probably because of bad press regarding greenhouse gas emissions and poor health outcomes. In fact, presidents of both parties have frequently demonstrated that they will stop at nothing to keep not just beef but all meat plentiful. During the Obama presidency, despite gestures toward progressive environment policies, there were pushes to speed up poultry processing, continued antibiotic overuse in factory farm operations, and other issues in the meat industry that went unattended. At the start of the pandemic, Donald Trump declared meat processing “critical infrastructure”, keeping factories open regardless of safety. Between April 2020 and April 2021, nearly 60,000 meatpacking workers became infected with the coronavirus.

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https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/aug/14/beef-american-masculinity-beef-cowboys