Wiener Roast

Last summer my meat-eating friends suddenly stopped inviting me to their barbecues. I wondered what the heck I had done wrong, and felt like an outcast. I had always brought tofu-dogs and veggie-burgers, and enough buns for everyone.

I had some really conflicting feelings about it. I was sad to be intentionally excluded from this rite of male bonding. Standing over red-hot coals and pressing those handsome grill lines onto my zucchini slices and portobello heads clearly wasn’t cutting it. No matter how thick I slathered Annie’s BBQ Sauce onto the seitan kabob, or how perfectly sweet the grilled corn came out, something was off, and they sensed it.

Truth be told, I didn’t love having to watch the limbs and parts of animals who I am fighting to have validated burn and sizzle, and then be devoured so carelessly. And now, I no longer had to worry about showing up with enough food for everyone so I could prove again and again that vegans don’t starve at a cookout, and that there are plenty of delicious options – from Field Roast and Tofurkey sausages to black bean burgers and every ripe veggie you can think of. We’ve even got good marshmallows for toasting that have zero boiled hooves in them. I would no longer have to ask for a corner of the grill to be kept clear of animal’s body parts, and I wouldn’t have to deal with the constant proclamations from these guys that they “love their meat” as they pound beers and laugh about that weeks travails.

In the days that people were hunter-gatherers, dudes would go out hunting together (some still do, but the relationships to the land and animals are quite different!). This defined the majority of a man’s identity. Thousands of years later, guys are still playing out part of this ritual, typically without having actually killed anything themselves. Our ‘hunting’ victory now depends on an obscure industrial farming system whose activities are shrouded behind the illusions of cows, chickens, and pigs in paradise, summoned by expensive advertising agencies, as opposed to spears and arrows. Our desire for primitive masculinity; being a real man, is convoluted, to say the least.

Meat-eating has always been associated with manliness in our culture. Traditionally, the predatory nature of hunting required physical strength, stamina, tool-making, and often hours to days of tracking herds. Then there was the kill; the bloody and exhausting act of taking down large animals, cutting them up and bringing them home. Many anthropologists and primatologists now argue that meat was a pivotal way to exert social control in the form of currency due to its desirability – especially to pregnant women who needed concentrated, high-protein food sources. The emphasis of the hunt was not so much about the killing of the animal per se, but in the selective and political doling out of the meat as currency. Meat is power.* While women may have collected most gatherer-hunter protein sources, we should not ignore the fact that men were able to use meat for their own selfish and manipulative political ends. It’s no surprise then, that thousands of years later, most men still identify with this nearly-universal symbol of masculine social and political power, though they rarely grasp why.

Soon enough I realized that this exclusion was more about what I hadn’t done. Though I kept my mouth shut about animal rights, my very presence was a threat to their masculinity – an unspoken reminder that shattered the tasty sacrament of boding over the ‘kill’. I failed to support their illusions about where meat comes from simply by bringing tofu-dogs, and that’s just no fun for them.

I doubt they’d be able to articulate this to me, or if they’d even agree with this after reading it – but I feel strongly that mainstream masculinity is major obstacle in moving towards sustainability.

This summer, I plan to have a few barbecues. They’ll be vegan, they’ll be delicious, and I’m OK with being a man that isn’t defined by such a stifling and archaic identity. Now, pass the ketchup!

[1] Source