“To threaten the primacy of meat in the American diet is to threaten a pillar of what it means to be a free American.”

The above quote comes from a great article in The Nation by Eamon Whalen titled How Red Meat Became the Red Pill for the Alt-Right. The article gives a fantastic history of the politics at play behind what we eat, and specifically exposes how eating meat in the West became synonymous with manliness. If there is one thing the article gets exactly right it’s that dietary proclivities are nothing if not political and/or religious in nature; We eat what we eat because of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Taking into account non-human and environmental rights, plus the fact that “Industrial beef is the most polluting, the most carbon-emitting, and the most resource-intensive form of protein,” this is why I consider myself what philosopher, Dominique Lestal, terms a political vegetarian. I make no bones about it. The rugged American, masculine, meat-eating mythos is horribly pernicious and toxic and I would not be sad at all if it was completely squashed and forgotten.

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Painting above: Claude Monet, Still Life The Joint Of Meat

Tags:animal rightsdietfeminismmasculinitymeatpoliticsveganismvegitarianism