Meat as Manhood: How Fragile Masculinity Drives Meat Eating

If you ask a man why he eats meat, chances are he’ll say it tastes good. But beneath that surface-level answer lies a cultural machinery so old and powerful that most men don’t even know it’s running. It isn’t hunger, habit, or protein that’s keeping meat on the menu, it’s masculinity.

A series of recent studies reveals just how deep the gender divide in diet goes. Men still eat far more meat and dairy than women, are far less likely to go vegan or vegetarian, and show the strongest attachment to animal products when their sense of masculinity is tied to dominance, self-reliance, and achievement. In other words: men aren’t just eating steak, they’re eating an identity.

The gendered plate

In 2025, researchers from Bryant Research, the University of Bath, and the University of Zurich conducted one of the most comprehensive investigations into the relationship between masculinity and meat consumption ever undertaken. Their findings, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, confirm what animal advocates and sociologists have long suspected: the more traditional a man’s views on masculinity, the more likely he is to consume animal products, and defend doing so.

The study surveyed over a thousand men in the UK, measuring their adherence to traits such as “self-reliance,” “emotional restraint,” and “avoidance of femininity.” The men who scored highest in these areas also ate the most red meat and poultry and showed the strongest emotional attachment to both meat and dairy.

They were also more likely to describe meat as masculine and vegetarianism as a “cultural threat.” But two beliefs stood out as particularly powerful: the idea that men should be the family providers (achievement status) and the belief that femininity should be avoided. Those two norms, success and separation from the feminine, predicted meat attachment more strongly than any other factor.

In follow-up focus groups, these same men insisted their gender had nothing to do with their diets. Yet within minutes they described scenes that read like parodies of masculinity: ordering steak to impress other “alpha males,” feeling pressure to grill meat at barbecues, mocking salads as “rabbit food.”

As the study’s lead author, Elise Hankins, put it, “The connection between masculinity and meat is largely implicit. Men may not consciously link gender to food, but social cues and expectations still shape what ends up on their plates.”

Meat as a performance

This unspoken performance of masculinity, the ritual of proving manhood through consumption, isn’t new. As feminist scholar Carol J. Adams argued decades ago, “meat eating is a symbol of male dominance.” The modern “steak and success” culture is simply the updated uniform of the same hierarchy: men asserting control over life, death, and status through what (and whom) they consume.

It’s telling that the masculine identity most threatened by plant-based eating is the one built on power over others. In Hankins and colleagues’ study, men who viewed themselves as breadwinners or who rejected anything coded as feminine were also the least open to change. For these men, veganism isn’t just a diet shift, it’s a symbolic demotion.

But that defensiveness reveals something fragile: if masculinity can be “threatened” by tofu, perhaps it isn’t strength at all, but fear of being perceived as weak.

This cultural narrative plays out globally. A 2024 longitudinal study by Nezlek and Forestell, published in Sex Roles, tracked fifteen years of dietary data from over twelve thousand American students. Women’s rates of veganism and vegetarianism more than doubled during that time; men’s stayed flat. The gap widened, not because women changed more, but because men didn’t change at all.

When the researchers asked why, the motivations diverged: women most often cited ethics, men cited health and the environment. The compassion-based reasoning that drove women’s choices was the same one men avoided, the very quality patriarchal culture labels “feminine.”

In other words, as moral awareness around animal exploitation rose, women acted. Men intellectualised. The empathy stayed theoretical, buried under cultural conditioning that still teaches boys to suppress feeling and equates care with weakness.

The carbon cost of masculinity

A working paper from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (Berland & Leroutier, 2025) found that men’s food and transport consumption produces 26% more carbon emissions than women’s. That’s not because men burn more calories or have longer commutes; it’s largely down to two habits emblematic of male identity: eating red meat and driving cars.

Even after controlling for factors like body size, income, and distance travelled, men’s choices generated roughly 1.4 tonnes more CO₂ per year. The study concluded that “policies affecting societal norms around gendered consumption patterns, such as associating eating meat with being masculine, could influence carbon footprints.”

Translation: our cultural scripts about what it means to be a “real man” are cooking the planet.

Masculinity, marketing, and myth-making

The link between gender and diet isn’t just personal, it’s profitable. The meat industry has long traded on masculinity to sell its products, casting meat as a shorthand for virility, success, and patriotism. From steakhouse slogans to beer-soaked barbecue ads, the message is the same: real men dominate.

Even plant-based companies now flirt with the same aesthetic. Impossible Foods’ 2024 rebrand leaned heavily into American machismo, a mustachioed hero straddling a motorcycle, scarfing burgers under roaring engines. This parody of masculinity wasn’t subversion; it was replication. Instead of challenging the idea that strength equals domination, it simply offered a new product for the same old myth.

Academic research supports this: when men feel their masculinity is under threat, they double down on meat consumption. Nakagawa and Hart (2019) found that even subtle challenges, such as being told men and women enjoy similar foods, triggered a stronger preference for meat-heavy meals. “Steak,” in this context, becomes more than food. It’s reassurance.

This phenomenon is so entrenched that some environmental psychologists now argue that traditional masculinity is a “barrier to climate action.” Studies show that men are less likely than women to recycle, use reusable shopping bags, or engage in plant-based eating, behaviours often stereotyped as “feminine.” The irony is exquisite: the gender supposedly defined by strength and independence is the one most constrained by social expectation.

Men, meat, and moral disengagement

The psychological distance between men and their meals also runs deeper than habit. It touches on a concept known as moral disengagement, the mental tricks people use to silence empathy. When eating animals conflicts with caring about them, we create justifications to bridge the gap: “It’s natural, normal, nice, and necessary.” These are known as the “4 Ns” of meat eating.

Men who score higher in meat attachment, that is, those who feel most emotionally bonded to meat, are also the ones who most strongly endorse those justifications. Studies repeatedly show that men are more likely to deny animal sentience, downplay suffering, and dismiss veganism as unrealistic or extreme. These aren’t reasoned positions; they’re ego defences.

The same men who say they “love animals” may still view compassion as feminine, even shameful. In that light, eating meat becomes a way to affirm their belonging to a group that values dominance over empathy. The animal’s body becomes the proof.

How gendered power fuels planetary harm

The environmental consequences of this conditioning are staggering. Animal agriculture already uses 80% of global farmland, emits more greenhouse gases than all transport combined, and drives deforestation, ocean dead zones, and mass extinction. The top contributors to this destruction are not just individuals but patterns, gendered, cultural, and systemic.

A masculinity built on consumption and conquest fuels industries that mirror those values: the exploitation of animals, the extraction of fossil fuels, the domination of ecosystems. When strength is defined as control rather than care, both empathy and ecology become casualties.

It’s no coincidence that the same traits celebrated as masculine, competitiveness, stoicism, invulnerability, map neatly onto capitalist values. The idea of the “provider” who conquers, consumes, and never questions is not just bad for animals or the planet; it’s bad for men themselves.

Men are socialised to prove worth through excess: eat more, drive more, own more. Yet this endless pursuit of external validation leaves no space for connection or vulnerability, the very qualities that could help dismantle both patriarchy and speciesism.

Rethinking strength

If masculinity has been weaponised to defend exploitation, it can also be redefined to reject it. Research suggests that framing plant-based eating as empowering rather than emasculating increases male openness to change. Campaigns that emphasise autonomy, health, and performance benefits are far more effective than those that appeal purely to ethics or compassion, not because men don’t care, but because they’ve been taught not to show it.

In that sense, reframing veganism is less about pandering to fragile egos and more about deconstructing them. Strength is not domination. It’s discipline, the ability to make choices guided by principle rather than impulse, to confront conditioning rather than hide behind it.

Vegan men who embody that conviction often describe it not as a loss of masculinity but as an evolution of it. They reclaim control over their values instead of performing inherited ones. They’re not “soy boys”; they’re men who refuse to define themselves by what or whom they consume.

Why women lead, and what that means

The gender gap in veganism isn’t a coincidence. Across countries, women consistently report higher concern for animal welfare and the environment, are more likely to vote for green policies, and adopt sustainable behaviours at higher rates. The long-term data from Nezlek and Forestell’s study confirms that women’s ethical motivations are driving veganism’s quiet rise, even as men’s rates stagnate.

Yet this isn’t about virtue; it’s about conditioning. Girls are often socialised to nurture, to empathise, to manage relationships. Boys are socialised to compete, to suppress emotion, to treat care as weakness. Those cultural scripts ripple into everything from diet to democracy.

When compassion is feminised, justice movements become gendered, and men risk alienating themselves from their own capacity for empathy. The cost of that detachment isn’t just moral; it’s ecological. Men’s greater attachment to meat literally accelerates climate collapse.

Breaking the cycle

So how do we untangle masculinity from meat? The researchers behind the Macho Meals study offer several clues:

▫️Highlight taste and enjoyment. If flavour is the strongest motivator, prove that plants can deliver it.

▫️Emphasise health and performance. Link plant-based diets to vitality, endurance, and longevity.

▫️Use relatable male role models. Athletes, doctors, and public figures who challenge stereotypes help normalise compassion as strength.

▫️Avoid shaming language. Framing veganism as moral superiority backfires with men whose identities are already defensive.

▫️Leverage social influence. Men are far more likely to change when peers or partners lead by example.

▫️Make it easy. Accessibility and price parity matter, no amount of awareness can overcome empty shelves or inflated prices.

These aren’t marketing gimmicks; they’re ways to bypass the psychological defences built by patriarchy. Every cultural change begins with meeting people where they are, even if that place is behind a barbecue.

The irony of the “real man”

The stereotype of the “real man” who eats steak and scoffs at salads has always been a fiction, sold by industries that profit from insecurity. There’s nothing inherently masculine about meat, only about the stories we tell to justify it. And right now, those stories are costing us the planet.

In a world where masculinity is still measured by domination, perhaps the most radical act a man can perform is refusal: refusing to kill when killing is unnecessary, refusing to consume what destroys, refusing to mistake empathy for weakness.

The strongest men are not those who cling to outdated hierarchies but those willing to dismantle them, including the one that puts humans above animals and men above compassion.