Meat and Gender

When I think of gender roles and food, I tend to think of my grandparents. Both of them love food. They eat out at fantastic restaurants at least once a week. They like to travel, and my grandfather can tell you the specific meal he ate in almost every city or country he has been to, complete with descriptions of the restaurant’s decor. They also like to cook, and both of them can prepared dishes that make you groan with pleasure. Even so, my grandfather only cooks for special occasions while my grandmother has always held the role of the day-to-day cook. Like the female participants in the study by Cairns, Johnston, and Baumann, my grandmother’s connection to food has always been wrapped up in a need to please her husband and children and to feed them delicious, nourishing meals. Though she loved to cook, it could never be just a pleasant hobby for her; she had a family to feed. For my grandfather, though, cooking was something he could do when he pleased. In the end, this meant that he only cooked for company. When guests were coming, he and my grandmother would work for hours preparing a delicious meal. And his job? The meat.

It’s not surprising, of course. Meat has traditionally been the man’s job. But the effect was that he got most of the attention for the cooking because he got to prepare the main course. He got praises while my grandmother got pats on the back.

One important factor in this scenario is the understanding that the meat is the main course of the meal. Yes, meat is connected to masculinity, but why is the meat then elevated above all the other foods in the meal? What makes the main course… “main”? There is no objective reason that we should relegate asparagus or rice to the position of side dish while chicken or steak gets to grab all of the attention. Certainly this is not the case in all cultures, as demonstrated by our class discussion about India. Yet, when I tell people that I’m a vegetarian, they’re confounded by what I could possibly eat as the main course of my dinner. Apparently, meat is the only answer. 

It’s interesting, then, to think about who tends to choose a meatless diet. Who are the people willing to abandon our cultural custom of eating meat? This question should go beyond the basic gender dichotomy (which results in the finding that women become vegetarians more than men) to explore which women and which men choose to be vegetarians. In the study by Bellows et al., women who tended to score high in the natural/vegetarian factor were most often single, whether they were separated, divorced, or widowed (545). And, as noted in Ruby’s article, adolescent girls who are considering vegetarianism may refrain from a meatless diet because they feel that their fathers or brothers would disapprove (148). Both of these findings suggest that the presence of a prominent male figure may discourage women from becoming vegetarians, whether that man is a romantic partner or a father. Whether these men openly discourage vegetarianism or if women simply assume that it will be opposed, the objection of men seems to have a significant effect on the meat consumption of women. That was certainly the case with me - I chose to become a vegetarian after I left for college because, at home, I had always feared upsetting my dad. And when I did become a vegetarian, it was my dad who rejected my choice while my mother supported it and tried obsessively to accommodate it (again, a mother trying to attend to the food preferences of her child in the role of nourisher and caregiver). 

In both the discussion of my grandparents and the question of which women become vegetarians, the need to please others comes up for women and their relationships with food. How could this affect women’s relationships with food in other ways? How might this concept of “pleasing” affect the number of women who diet? In what other ways might this manifest?