Isn't veganism unmanly? Real men eat meat.

The objection

“Eating meat is part of being a man. Veganism is for soy boys, not real blokes.”

The answer

The link between meat and manliness is marketing and culture, and researchers have measured exactly that.

Rozin and colleagues (2012), in a paper titled Is Meat Male?, found a consistent mental link between muscle meat and maleness across six different methods. Rothgerber (2013) found that the attitudes men reach for to justify eating meat track closely with masculinity. The association runs so deep that simply threatening a man’s sense of masculinity makes him cling harder to meat (Nakagawa & Hart, 2019). Across 23 countries studied, men ate more meat than women in every single one (Hopwood et al., 2024). That is a pattern about identity, not about what a body needs.

The “soy boy” jibe is the easiest part to put down. Pooling 38 clinical trials, soy was found to have no measurable effect on men’s testosterone or oestrogen (the soy file has the detail).

And strength plainly does not come from a steak. Patrik Baboumian was crowned Germany’s Strongest Man and set a world-record yoke walk of 555 kg, as a vegan. Kendrick Farris broke the US weightlifting total record while competing as a vegan at three Olympic Games. You can build all the muscle you want on plants (building muscle).

So here is the reframe. If your manhood depends on paying someone else to kill an animal for you, that is not strength. Looking hard at the evidence and changing your mind while the whole table gives you grief takes a good deal more backbone than ordering the usual.