Why Is Meat Manly?

The strange history that transformed “man the hunter” into man the back yard BBQ grill master

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We correlate men with being meat-eaters because it associates the idea of man as hunter (although have always hunted, also). But, there’s far more to it than this.

Men were also the primary cowboys, ranchers, branders, horsemen, rodeo dudes, chuckwagon masters, then railroad engineers, runners, protection and security sheriffs, and more recently, truckers, who bring the livestock to your local Walmart.

Once upon a time, the early human female, or later, the butcher’s wife, participated in the cutting up and distribution of all hunted game. This has been lost to almost all Western culture, except to anthropologists and paleo archeologists.

Conquistadors and cowboys are partly the reason. The idea of conquering the wild is both heroic and romantic. It was often, also, a “no girls allowed” club house.

The cattle drive was a mass influence for cowboy cooking, but despite the beef and big Texas steak reputation of the, most cowboys ate more and corn than meat as a matter of practicality.

In between and amongst all of those jobs, men were butchers, meat-packers, and for the mid-century of the 1900–1980’s, men were…