You may be familiar with the recent advertising campaign in which a man refuses a bite of his female friend’s salad on the grounds that he’s a “Meatatarian.” “Beef, bacon – you know, a Meatatarian? It’s a personal choice,” he says, thoughtfully jamming a Wendy’s burger with six strips of scar-pink bacon and two glistening brown patties into his mouth.
Putting aside just how ugly the word “Meatatarian” looks in print, the campaign gives us the latest interpretation of an interesting quirk in North American culture: the privileged status of meat. The central joke relies on the basic assumption that being a vegetarian is ridiculous and/or fey and/or heretical, and that any reasonable person knows meat is the best food you can eat.
This assumption – widely held by pit jockeys, CEOs and the few dozen cranky old men who had dinner at Fran’s Diner in Toronto before the Willie Nelson show earlier this month, one of whom I sat beside long enough to hear him give a long sermon to his mute wife about how vegetarians are all skinny, pale and sick-looking – is based in a few ideas about meat that ostensibly go all the way back to our caveman beginnings, but that, upon reflection, seem a bit out of touch with current realities.
The first is that, because meat comes from animals that we must catch and kill in order to eat, consuming it is a sign of manliness or dominance. Meat is closely associated with physical strength and skill, and it’s common for people to equate rareness (of meat) proportionally with mettle – the bloodier the steak, the closer it is to freshly-killed quarry, the more you must tear at it in the manner of a carnivorous beast in order to eat it; and therefore, the more it makes you a fierce alpha animal, mighty and self-sufficient king of the food chain, the blood of the felled and ingested smeared across your face like war paint. As long as you can kill something, the story goes, you will never go hungry.
Stemming from this idea are two others that appear to contradict each other, although the legions of proud meat eaters out there don’t seems to mind all that much. On the one hand, we have the notion of meat as status symbol. There’s a reason most ostentatious steakhouses are found in (or near) major financial districts: people equate meat, which is more expensive than vegetables, with wealth and power, a notion that evolved out of the aforementioned carnivore-hunter prototype. Think about the typical image of the medieval banquet, with a fat king chomping lustily on a giant drumstick, and you get the idea.
On the other hand, there’s the notion that meat makes you normal. The term “meat and potatoes” is used to indicate that someone or something is regular, blue collar, upstanding and down-to-earth, and it subtly implies that someone who eats mostly other stuff – plants or grains, say – is a deviant or weirdo, the kind of person who probably does strange drugs or smells like sandalwood or collects child pornography, or, even worse, votes for Ralph Nader. Same goes for “Ham and Egger,” which the Urban Dictionary defines as “A common person who might be seen eating ham and eggs. Not possessing many spectacular qualities. Your ‘average joe’.” Meat, these phrases would have us believe, is the representative meal of the Everyman.
Of the millions of people that eat meat every day, I would guess a pretty low percentage of them have ever killed an animal to eat it.Taken side by side, these ideas give us meat as one of the few things in our culture that signifies both elite status and normalcy, both power and conformity. What I find puzzling is that, when you look at how we eat these days, the notion of meat as manly in the predator/prey sense, or as traditional in the sense of being a great normalizer, falls apart.
Of the millions of people that eat meat every day, I would guess a pretty low percentage of them have ever killed an animal to eat it. Most of us buy our meat from Styrofoam trays in the meat section of the grocery store, and I would guess that most average consumers like the sterility of the whole transaction – i.e., being able to dissociate meat from the animal it comes from. Some people still hunt, sure, but almost no one in North America hunts for the primary purpose of feeding themselves, and most urban consumers never even get to witness scenes like the one in the photograph above, taken during a butchering class I attended at the Healthy Butcher in Toronto, where they like you to know which muscle of the pig you’re slathering in mustard (because it makes for responsible consumption, but also because it means you can ask for some of the secret cuts that rarely get sold in standard grocery stores but taste much better than that chalky tenderloin you’ve been eating). This distance from the physical reality of meat – the life and death of the animal – is convenient, but neuters the concept of meat as the spoils of a successful conquest.
On the other hand, lots of people (and the number is increasing) grow vegetables to eat, and anyone who has will know it’s not especially easy. Simple, maybe, but planting and nurturing plants that stay healthy, yield plentiful and tasty edibles and don’t frustrate the hell out of you is no small feat, especially in an urban environment where space is scarce and the soil isn’t exactly heartland-rich. Besides which, there’s something empowering about the idea of controlling your own food in a world in which most things are controlled and influenced and handled by the market – a situation that, as we’re all seeing right now, can have ugly consequences.
It seems to me, then, that we might want to reevaluate our ideas about superiority and self-sufficiency and survival as they pertain to meat. Perhaps the test of whether the proverbial provider is a skilled enough to survive in a harsh and dangerous world should no longer be measured in muscle and bone, but in how many tomatoes you can manage to coax out of your windowsill tomato plant. Perhaps the quality of being down to earth should be symbolized not with meatloaf and pork chops, but with carrots and onions, which require one to get down to earth in the literal sense. Show me a person who can pick a crate of apples from his backyard tree, and I’ll show you someone I want on my side when the grid collapses and the supermarkets go dark.
In light of all this, I propose a kind of answer to the Meatatarian campaign: a term to denote someone who doesn’t necessarily eat only vegetables, but who likes them a lot, and who refuses to buy into the idea that meat is somehow superior, more normal or more glamourous that plant-based foods. Thus do I declare myself – with nods to plain old enthusiasm and to a guy who had some ideas about what happens when our appetites put stress on the world’s resources, as some are now claiming the West’s overconsumption of meat is doing – a proud Vegethusian. Now all I need is a theme song…
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
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