Recently, I began a job at a vegan café. Everything we serve is delicious, from the vegan and gluten-free lunch bowls to the fresh almond milk espresso lattes. It’s all vegan friendly, gluten-free, organic and local, and as a result, I have become an accidental vegan. After a week of eating this food, my body started rejecting meat and gluten. Whenever I ate meat or gluten I felt malaise, fatigue and bloat. After my first weekend experiencing sickness and discomfort from trying to balance meat-eating with my new raw and vegan habits, I decided to just go full vegan. I feel amazing, but my new vegan lifestyle has met a hostile online audience, primarily made up of men.

I tend to snap pics of my delicious looking treats and lunches daily and post them to Instagram and Facebook, and my profile has become a minefield of snarky comments, degrading messages and, yes, privately-sent pictures of steaks and other cooked meats.

This response from my male friends on Facebook has provoked me to question: does something about my veganism threaten their masculinity? A quick search on Google shows me that there have been a plethora of studies, articles and academic research in the area of masculinity and meat-eating investigating what one really has to do with the other.

One study done in 2006 cites  studies “suggesting that men and women ‘do gender’ by consuming gender appropriate foods. Meat, especially red meat, is an archetypical masculine food.” (Robal) An article printed in the Daily Mail, UK in 2012 stated, “that meat eating was linked with manhood, power, and virility. […] There is a group of manly men who swear off what they call chick food, and they seek a double whopper to declare their manhood. […] Meat consumption is a symbol of patriarchy resulting from its long-held alliance with manhood, power, and virility.”

Academia aside, these foodie tropes are reproduced time and time again in mass-consumed popular culture. Cosmo-esque magazines and websites have us convinced we can read a man and his sexuality by his food choices; Burly, strong and powerful men are steak-lovers, spicy-food folks are adventurous, and vegetarian or vegan males are… questionable? And of course, the barbecue is man’s primary domain, an expression of evolutionary purpose: to kill, grill and eat.

It would seem as though one’s ability to “do” their gender properly (see: masculinity) is to do their food the “right” way. This applies to how it’s eaten, where it comes from, whether or not it was once alive, and how often you point it out to other folks just to prove some sort of point about your place in the world.

I take issue with these aggressive tactics of pointing out and reasserting masculinity on my personal feeds on Facebook. As a vegan, I do not push my lifestyle on others, nor condemn folks who wish to eat meat and animal by products. I see photos of peeps barbequing and eating hot dogs at Jays games all the time and never once have felt the need to privately send them pictures of my vegetable garden, or assert my veganism by commenting on their walls and personal photos. But I don’t blame these individuals at all… Meat eating or not, I stand with and feel for these fine folks who feel the need to point out their steak-loving ways in the face of a culture that aims to define their masculinity in a  rigid and unforgiving way. 

But, until we can all stop trying to live up to the demands of an aggressive and emotionally violent culture and truly aim to set ourselves free from the bonds of expectations of self, gender, sexuality and food, I’ll be vegan and I’ll be rooting for you and your freedom from the rigid expectations of masculinity.