How meat became a measure of manhood |
The context you need, when you need it
When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.
We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?
How meat became a measure of manhood
And what happened when a nutrition influencer dared to eat tofu.
In January, a 24-year old nutrition influencer named Jacob Smith made the grave mistake of becoming a little too curious about tofu.
Smith had read a study about the health benefits of eating less meat and figured he’d try to replace a small amount of the animal products he ate with plant-based foods. So, as content creators do, Smith brought his 170,000 Instagram followers along on his plant-based exploration.
In his first plant-based video, he filmed himself cooking tofu. In the comments, some of his followers gave him helpful tips on how to make it better next time. But a lot of people called him the well-worn insult known to any guy with a platform who dares to proudly eat tofu on social media: soy boy.
In order to sustainably feed a growing world population, people in rich countries will need to eat less meat and more plant-based foods. But that’s proven to be a tough sell to men, many of whom believe that eating meat is part of what makes them masculine.
The idea that real men must eat meat is pervasive in food advertising and pop culture, and its roots can be found in the “man the hunter” theory of anthropology, which argues that prior to modern civilization, men handled the hunting. The theory has come under increasing criticism, as researchers have found more evidence that throughout human history women hunted too.
At the same time, a growing movement of professional and amateur male athletes have embraced plant-based eating, arguing it helps them competitively — and doesn’t make them any less manly.
Cooking tofu was a departure for Smith, as just a few years prior, he had virtually no interest in plant-based proteins. Early on in college, Smith had followed what amounted to a carnivore diet — eating loads of meat and eggs — and dabbled in other dietary trends. But he eventually went back to a more “normal diet,” he told me, and went on to earn a master’s degree in dietetics. During his graduate program, he built a large Instagram following by explaining what he describes as “evidence-based nutrition,” covering research and debunking inaccurate health information.
Although Smith has remained a meat-eater, the response to his tofu video inspired him to start a series of videos testing out other plant-based protein sources, like seitan and tempeh, cheekily leaning into the criticisms he was getting. “I started calling it the Soy Boy Chronicles,” Smith told me.
The chronicles caught fire, each video racking up hundreds of thousands of views and with them, a flood of angry comments.
For “almost the majority of haters,” he told me, “their main critique about eating plant-based is it’s going to make you have more estrogen and that’s going to make you more feminine.” Of course, men and women both naturally produce the hormone estrogen, and eating soy foods doesn’t change men’s hormonal makeup. Plus, it’s well-established that soy products are not only safe to eat but also confer a number of health benefits, especially when replacing processed and red meats. (And estrogen, it turns out, may have been critical to early humans’ hunting abilities — more on this later.)
Some commenters said his newfound interest in plant-based foods explained why he’s weak (he is, in fact, quite jacked), made his voice sound “feminine” (he sounds like your average dude), or even more absurdly, that it would lead him to grow breasts or become gay. “I don’t even know where these ideas come from,” he told me, exasperated.
But Elina Vrijsen, who researches food and communication sciences at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium, has some ideas about that. “People probably perceive him as a very normative masculine man because he eats meat” and he’s fit, she told me. “But then he breaks his boundaries of masculinity by eating vegan food, and for a lot of people, this brings a lot of tension and a lot of questions.”
Smith has a similar theory. If he became fully vegan, he suggests, the criticism might have been more tame. But “people have more desire to defend themselves against people who somewhat eat like them,” he said. He’s showing a middle ground is possible — that one doesn’t need to be vegan, nor endorse carnivorism.
One day, just a couple weeks after he had launched the Soy Boy Chronicles, he tried to log on to Instagram only to find that his account had been taken down. The reason? According to a screenshot Smith shared with Vox, Meta said it doesn’t allow its users to follow, praise, or support people or organizations it defines as dangerous.
Smith was confused. He........