Carol Adams Meat Eat Analysis

Carol Adams mentions that meat-eating is considered an activity reserved for men only. She explains how some aspects of our culture endorse this view. Adams gives the example of cookbooks stating that there is a stark difference between the sections addressed to men and those to women. The men’s section includes meat (London broil, cubed steak, beef dinner) while the women’s section includes cheese dishes and vegetables but never meat (p.28). This phenomenon is representative of the eating patterns found in a nineteenth century household. Men ate meat almost daily while women would have it about once a week (p.29). Meat is considered for the men only and women are obliged to save it for them. It was the same case for civilians in times of war: they had to learn to live without meat because the meat should be saved for the solider, the paragon of masculinity (p. 29,32). It was mentioned that cookbooks differentiated between men and women, here they differentiated between soldiers and civilians. Cookbooks for soldiers were filled with recipe after recipe of meat-containing foods while the civilian’s cookbooks contained recipes using complex carbohydrates and vegetables …show more content…
Since they were associated (in a way) with meat-eating, it can be deduced that meat-eating was an activity expected of men to exhibit their machismo. In fact, according to Adams, it was traditionally believed that men need meat for strength and that was falsely believed to be achieved by eating the muscles of strong animals (p.33). No matter how much evidence was found to contradict that belief, it was firmly ingrained in the minds of men. For example, the experiment performed by Irving Fisher which compared meat-eating athletes to vegetarian athletes and sedentary vegetarians. It was found that meat-eaters strength could not compare to that of not only athlete vegetarians but also sedentary vegetarians