Meatless meals and masculinity: How veg^* men explain their plant-based diets

Where’s the Beef? How Masculinity Exacerbates Gender Disparities in Health Behaviors

“…In these cases, medical professionals can be coached on how best to handle dietary recommendations that may conflict with an aspect of the patient's identity. This approach might be informed by existing research that examines how vegetarian and vegan men maintain their sense of masculinity despite their feminine-stereotyped diets (Mycek 2018). Resources like the Thug Kitchen cookbooks that posture a plant-based diet as aggressive and brazen also may be useful.…”

‘Good Morning Fitfam’: Top posts, hashtags and gender display on Instagram

“…Typically featuring men, posts of this kind served as prototypical visual representations of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, where physical strength, athleticism and competitiveness are valued over other masculine forms (Connell, 1987). While clean eating and meatless diets are ostensibly viewed as feminine practices, these diets were framed as a rational choice (both for the individual’s health and the environment), therefore upholding the traditional connection between reason and masculinity (Mycek, 2018). Often staged in a gym, posts of this kind focused on the individual subject, emphasising the hard work involved in training and ‘eating clean’.…”

“…‘Because gender is a way of structuring social practice in general, not a specific type of practice, it is unavoidably involved with other social structures’ (Connell, 1995: 75). Recent scholarship has explored the ways in which gender intersects with race (Crenshaw, 1991; McCune, 2014) and class (Mycek, 2018; Rose, 1993; Schippers, 2007). One limitation with our findings is that we do not examine how gender intersects with other social categories (e.g.…”

“…As a dietary practice, the clean eating movement is a system of classification. It enables practitioners to classify themselves in relation to their lifestyle, habits and tastes; feeding into middle-class values about the importance of unprocessed, organic, sustainable food (Mycek, 2018).…”

“…As a dietary practice, the clean eating movement is a system of classification. It enables practitioners to classify themselves in relation to their lifestyle, habits and tastes, feeding into middle class values about the importance of unprocessed, organic, sustainable food (Mycek, 2018). Exploring how Instagram users deploy clean eating–related hashtags is of significance because it reveals how the body is idealised online in relation to health and structured around axes of cultural difference.…”