Food for Thought

Men think they need to eat meat to be manly—and it’s making them sick

''Shortly after I became engaged, my family members began to worry aloud about the health of my future husband. You see, my fiancé Ray is a man—and he’s about to marry a pescatarian.

While it’s true that I don’t eat meat, I also have no plans to throw myself in Ray’s path if he wants to fix himself a burger. Yet my grandmother, cousins, and even my sister all seemed to assume that under my influence, he would wither away on a steady diet of fruit, vegetables, fish, eggs, cheese, grains and legumes.

To be fair, this is a pretty standard assumption. In the US, at least culturally speaking, we still seem to believe that men need meat. There’s just one problem: The close association between masculinity and meat is literally making men sick...''

by Deena Shanker