Real Men Eat Meat: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|''"Food, baby! PETA is wrong, I'm right. I'm adhering to the natural order, tooth fang and claw is it! To try and tell me that I can't eat flesh is just weird. I dunno even how to respond to such stupidity. This meat is food, case closed."''

 

That cow? Food. That dog? [[Eat the Dog|Food]]. [[Everything's Worse with Bears|That grizzly bear?]] Food. That roadkill? Eh... [[Extreme Omnivore|food]].

If you're a man, eat food. If you don't eat meat, you're not [[Rated "M" for Manly|manly]]. And eat red meat. Who only eats the white stuff? That's not meat; it's gotta bleed before it's meat. What are ya? Some skinny punk? [[Unfortunate Implications|A girl]]?

 

 

It never occurs to them that meat is simply part of a complete meal involving salad, meat, vegetables, dairy products, fruit, and [[Adjacent to This Complete Breakfast|this bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs]].

{{examples}}

== Advertising ==

* The Burger King "I Am Man" ads: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3YHrf9fGrw I am man, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore/And I'm way too hungry to settle for chick food...]

* The Burger Chef Rancher, basically a very large hamburger with no bun or condiments, with a side of "Texas toast" (regular toast sliced twice as thick as usual). The ads showed a big James Garner-looking guy coming in and going "I'LL HAVE A RANCHER."

** Sam Elliot and Robert Mitchum were part of that campaign, too. Just smell the testosterone!

* When Wendy's introduced a new line of salads, their commercials addressed this stigma: a guy is taunted by his buddies for ordering a salad, until they see how delicious it looks.

 

== Anime and Manga ==

* Luffy, the [[Hot-Blooded]] pirate captain of ''[[One Piece]]'', has an obsession with meat and hates vegetables. (Well, ''most'' vegetables. He's not averse to snacking on carrots or grapes now and then.) The first time he met Blackbeard, the two came to blows after Luffy turned down a restaurant's cherry pie with Blackbeard having the same negative opinion of well-done meat. In the [[Toriko]] Manga Crossover, it's revealed that his full course menu is meat. All of it. Including the Salad, Soup and Drink categories.

* Vegeta from ''[[Dragon Ball]]'' has this attitude. After being absorbed by Super Buu, he is disgusted upon seeing that the monster's stomach [[Real Men Hate Sugar|is full of sweets]] and "not a single bit of meat".

 

== Comic Books ==

* Lance Blastoff (a politically incorrect parody character from [[Frank Miller]]) who converts a beautiful vegetarian to meat eating by the extremely manly act of killing and roasting a dinosaur.

* [[Asterix|Asterix and Obelix]] both really like their roast boar.

 

== Film ==

* The fishing scene in ''[[Waterworld]]''.

* ''[[Zardoz]]''. The Exterminators are outraged when their god tells them to grow grain.

 

== Literature ==

* The warriors on [[Gor]] are quite fond of meat. In one book Tarl and his friend are at a fancy dinner party, but they both preferred a big steak to the delicacies being served. In another book he and his (different) friend take time out of their [[Quest]] to go hunting because they "need" to eat meat.

* Real [[Known Space|kzin]] eat meat. At least, modern male kzin do. The Kzinti have taken it so far, that as a [[Proud Warrior Race]] they went from ancestral omnivores to dedicated carnivores (except for ice cream).

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* Parodied in a ''[[Armstrong And Miller]]'' sketch where a King is hosting a massive banquet for the man of honor, but he doesn't really likes the food and so says he'll just eat his couscous he's brought in a tupperware box. He gets called out on his and says he'll gorge on the very next disk, a large roasted wild boar that has an apple in it's mouth. He leans over, grabs the apple and takes a bite, then complains that it's a Granny's Apple.

* According to one episode of ''[[The Red Green Show]]'', Dalton Humphrey only eats meat.

 

== Music ==

* The Scottish folk song "Tatties and Herrin" can be seen as an inversion, though it also invokes [[National Stereotypes]]:

{{quote|''Fan the queen's wantin' men tae gang fecht wi' her foes''

 

== Newspaper Comics ==

* In ''[[Garfield]]'', Irma's Diner offers the [http://garfield.nfshost.com/1999/07/16/ "He-Man hamburger"]{{Dead link}}, which is five-pound patty of ground beef on a bun.

 

== Video Games ==

* ''[[Rune]]''. Ragnar will pick up whole roast legs (not poultry, BIG legs, like lamb or venison probably) and strip them to the bone, or pluck giant lizards off walls and '''bite their head off''' in a single ravenous bite, then throw the bone/body over your shoulder? And wash that down with a flagon of mead, which you also casually toss aside to shatter on the floor. Oh, sure, there's sissy ''fruit'' growing on bushes occasionally. But aside from that, [[Health Food]] has never been manlier than ''Rune''.

* In ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'', Saxton Hale [http://www.teamfortress.com/war/saxtonhale/03.htm here].

 

== Web Original ==

* James Lileks' [http://lileks.com/institute/gallery/meat/index.html skewering of a meat cookbook].

* ''[[EPICMEALTIME]]'' has this but it was subverted for [[Fan Service]] in "Massive Meat Log" and it was played straight when they bring the girls in to eat dessert in "The Black Legend".

* ''[[Loading Ready Run]]''`s "Man Cooking" sections. In a nice case of deliberately [[Completely Missing the Point]], they once did a vegetarian episode, which involved making and cooking a giant mushroom shape. Out of meat.

* A recurring theme on ''[[The Best Page in The Universe]]''.

 

== Western Animation ==

* Sokka from ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'' is obsessed with meat (in contrast to vegetarian Aang).

** In fact, while trapped in the ground, he even admits that it's half of his personality: he's "Sokka, the meat and [[Deadpan Snarker|sarcasm]] guy" (but he's willing to give all that up and become "Sokka, the veggies and straight talk fellow" if he can just get out of that hole in the ground).

* A lot of evidence shows that the early Neanderthals had a mostly meat-based diet. Researchers also believed this carnivorous diet may have been partially responsible for their demise, as the end of the ice age meant there was no big game for them to catch and little knowledge on how to grow crops, unlike their rivals and human ancestors, the Cro-Magnon.

** [[Science Marches On|Recent finds]] suggest that the end on the Ice Age did little harm to the biosphere, and actually ''increased'' the biomass and biodiversity of the early European lands, which became a home to what is now known as a European megafauna. The lack of big game that brought the demise of the Neanderthals is entirely their own fault: they've simply [[Manly Men Can Hunt|hunted and]] [[Big Eater|ate it all]]. Similar situations repeated many times when the early humans arrived at the pristine ecosystems, like the Clovis culture in early North America and ancestors of the Aborigines in Australia and New Guinea.

* Another inversion: vegetarianism and veganism are very popular in the hyper-masculine [[Heavy Metal]] and [[Hardcore Punk]] scenes. Attila Csihar of [[Mayhem]], Gaahl of [[Gorgoroth]], Mark "Barney" Greenway of [[Napalm Death]], Geezer Butler of [[Black Sabbath]] and Ian MacKaye of [[Minor Threat]] are examples.

** See also [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeZlih4DDNg Vegan Black Metal Chef].

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Always Male]]

[[Category:Masculinity Tropes]]

[[Category:Food Tropes]]

[[Category:Gender and Sexuality Tropes]]