Real Men Eat Meat

"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."

— Ted Nugent, speaking on Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, S2 episode 1

That cow? Food. That dog? Food. That grizzly bear? Food. That crocodile? Food. That roadkill? Eh...food.

If you're a man, eat meat. If you don't eat meat, you're not 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? A girl?

In case you haven't guessed, real men eat meat. They are obsessed with meat, and the bigger, redder, bloodier the better. They will often brag about how rare they like it; "it should moo at me!" If the guy is eating poultry, you can bet it's a big greasy drumstick (perhaps invoking the famous image of Henry VIII). Fish barely qualifies for this trope in most instances, unless the character was already nautical-themed to begin with or if the fish in question is a huge and dangerous one (large sharks or tigerfish for instance). Bonus points are awarded if those items were deep-fried or smothered in hot sauce (or both). The other end of the spectrum goes up to deer, bears, dinosaurs and anything bigger, depending on the setting. Bonus points if the meat is something he himself killed.

It never occurs to them that meat is simply part of a complete meal involving salad, meat, vegetables, dairy products, fruit, and this bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs^note Technically humans can survive on only meat, if you include the organs and everything, you'll get all the nutrients you need because the cow already ate your greens for you. You might be a bit blocked — meat is low on fiber — but as long as you stay hydrated, you'll still be pooping and you won't die.. Also prevalent is a conviction that however much non-meat food a man eats, he'll still be hungry, for some reason.

As for exactly why a correlation between manliness and eating meat exists, don't expect this to ever be elaborated on.

If a girl is a carnivore, unless she's a holdout for low-carb, it's to show that she's tomboyish. In some cases, a manly character may even prefer their meat raw to show that they're too macho to need to cook it.

A subtrope of Testosterone Poisoning. Related to Manly Men Can Hunt and unrelated to Large Ham (although overlap is possible).

See also Real Men Hate Sugar, Meat Versus Veggies (men are more likely to be on the meat side), Real Men Take It Black, and Real Men Cook (it's often, but not necessarily, meat being cooked).

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Examples:

Advertising

• The Burger King "I Am Man" ad for the Texas Double Whopper: 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."
• Speaking of James Garner, he used to voice over those all-American "BEEF: IT'S WHAT'S FOR DINNER" ads brought to you by the National Livestock and Meat Board.
  • Sam Elliott 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.
• Commercials for Black Angus restaurant like this one feature a tough-looking outdoorsman who practically radiates testosterone. (Or satirizes such people.)
• Arby's loves advertising their products about how meat-filled they are, with the internet-friendly slogan, "We have the meats." They are also not afraid to diss or make fun of vegetarians.
• A television spot for an Army Men video game shows the green soldiers stranded in a kitchen with an open refrigerator, the only available foods being cottage cheese, tofu, and salads. The men lament they're going to starve because there's nothing to eat but "chick food." Sarge saves the day by finding and securing a turkey and, in keeping with the conditions above, helps himself to the drumstick.

Anime and Manga

• Bleach: The stage adaptation has an extra song with Ikkaku teaching Hanataro how to be manly. Eating RAW meat is one of the things a real man must do.
• Dragon Ball: Saiyans, in general, tend to prefer meat over other kinds of food. Ironically, all the Saiyans have names based on vegetables.
  • Dragon Ball Z: Vegeta has this attitude as when he's introduced he's casually munching on a bug-man's arm on a planet he and Nappa have just conquered. While he and Goku explore the innards of Super Buu, he is disgusted upon seeing that the monster's stomach is full of sweets, with nary a bit of meat in sight.
  • Dragon Ball Super: In episode 43, Goku's shopping list has the volume of what he's is buying: 10 kg of bread, 35 kg of pork, 30 kg of chicken, 50 kg of cow, 30 kg of goat, and 40 kg of horse. For those more familiar with pounds this is 22 lbs of bread, 77 lb of pork, 66 lb of chicken, 110 lb of cow, 66 lb of goat, and 88 lb of horse. Apparently, Goku not only loves diversity in meat, but he particularly loves beef.
• Dream Eater Merry: Isana's father uses this to justify snatching up all the meat during dinner, even while arguing that Yumeji doesn't eat enough vegetables. Yumeji counters by claiming tomatoes are a good enough (and manly enough) vegetable, and he eats plenty of those.
• Eyeshield 21: Gaou will only eat meat, which isn’t suprising considering that he's modeled after a T. rex. Other characters love meat too, but they only consider it as a tasty treat or source of protein, in case of Shin.
• Gamaran Shura has Bihoumaru: not only he's one of the largest and manliest fighters in the series, his Establishing Character Moment has him sitting in a cavern, speaking to himself in a rather crude manner, with a gigantic axe next to him and a headless deer's carcass on the ground, and he's, of course, eating meat from the severed deer's leg, painting him as a brutal, virile savage of a man.
• Hajime no Ippo: Played with. Ryuuhei Sawamura really, really likes meat and is a muscular boxer, but his love of meat is more to show off his insane tendencies, as repeatedly focuses on the “taste” of his defeated opponents, in a manner strongly resembling cannibalism.
• Living Dead!: Inverted as Toriko, a female zombie, loves to eat meat and has great knowledge of different types of meat. In fact, if she doesn't eat enough meat, she'll revert to a mindless zombie until she eats some.
• One Piece: Luffy, the Hot-Blooded pirate captain, has an obsession with meat.^note Though he is enough of an equal-opportunity Big Eater to also eat fruits and vegetables unprompted — in fact, that's how he got his powers to begin with. 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.
• Osomatsu-san: Parodied in the first episode when the brothers reimagine themselves as being cooler than they actually are. Casanova Wannabe Karamatsu is described as a "carnivorous carnivore who eats his meat wrapped in more meat".
• Ouran High School Host Club: Hunny of the titular Ouran Host Club tries to follow this in as a part of building himself as a suitable heir for his family. It doesn't take and he goes back to eating sweets.
• PandoraHearts: Inverted with resident Action Girl Alice is known for her love of eating meat and is even distracted by it at times. She and her kind though usually eat humans, hence her craving for meat.
• Silver Spoon: Subverted. The biggest carnivore at a school full of large, burly manly men is Ikeda, a small, shy, timid girl. She was one of the biggest investors in both incarnations of the Pork Fund, and the mention of 100% beef hamburgers causes her to spontaneously materialize with a facial expression high school girls normally reserve for members of their favourite Boy Band.
• Toriko: Takes up a large amount of stories in the show, as mentioned above. Subverted, however, as the extremely muscular and tough Toriko is shown to enjoy all types of food, loving equally meat, vegetables, soups, and desserts.

Comic Books

• Asterix and Obelix both really like their roast boar.
• 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.
• Used subtly in Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, when Bruce Wayne orders for himself and Lex Luthor at a business dinner. The chef is said to be Gotham's finest, but Bruce cuts his description of the night's dishes short and just orders two strip steaks. It's a form of macho posturing on Bruce's part, as he plays the role of the billionaire playboy.
• Averted in Superman: Birthright, which established Superman as a vegetarian in keeping with his cherishing and protection of lives in general. Other stories tend to go back and forth on whether he's a vegetarian or not, ones that don't will make his favorite food beef bourguignon with ketchup.
• The Incredible Hulk: Both Bruce Banner and the Hulk love meat.
• The Mighty Thor: Thor and other Asgardians love their epic feasts with entire roast pigs or cows as the main course.
• Ultimate Marvel: Ultimate Bruce Banner is a vegetarian (except in his first appearance, when he orders the pot roast). Ultimate Hulk eats meat, including bad guys. His girlfriend seemed a little turned on.

Fan Works

• Briefly mentioned in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World; one of the vegetarian Paul's many gripes about Andro is that he keeps telling Paul he'd be stronger if he ate meat.
• The griffins of Protocera in the Triptych Continuum. Not only do they eat as close to a pure-meat diet as they can get away with (they need a certain amount of fruit to give them quick sugars for flight), but they also strongly prefer meat taken from animals that can fight back (sharks, ostrich, etc, as well as many of the non-sapient species of monster).

Film

• Black Panther (2018): M'Baku, leader of the physically-powerful Jabari tribe, threatens to feed Ross to his children. After a moment, he bursts out laughing and says they're vegetarians.
• Buffalo Soldiers: Defied by the head of the MP at the military base, who is a very manly Scary Black Man who abhors meat. The main character uses this to mess with him by only providing him with sausages during a drug cooking.
• The Croods averts this. Eep, her mother, and her grandmother are happily carnivorous. Watch just how fast the giant bird's leg disappears in Eep's care. Granted, they're all likely opportunistic omnivores, but jeez...!
• Subverted in My Favorite Wife: The very macho Stephen Burkett, played by the very macho Randolph Scott, is a vegetarian.
• The two Retired Badass uncles of Secondhand Lions have a diet that consists of mostly meat. Walter insists they change this later on.
• This might be the Aesop of Troll 2. Eating veggies is bad for you!
• The fishing scene in Waterworld.
• Zardoz. The Exterminators are outraged when their god tells them to grow grain.

Literature

• In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea this is a problem for mostly manly man Ned Land since the Nautilus rarely goes even remotely close to shore. He does eventually get some pork... and promptly stops wailing about not having meat when they almost are murdered by natives. Amusingly enough, Nemo is also willing to risk his life helping Ned get the pork back to the Nautilus.
• Whenever a story has a scene where Conan the Barbarian is having a meal, he's usually eating a "joint of beef" and washing it down with either ale or wine.
• Sam Vimes of Discworld prefers his BLT^note Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato sandwiches with as little L and T as possible, and with all the more B. His wife has been getting on his and his subordinates' case to reduce the B on any given sandwich (especially the burnt crunchy variety). It rather ties into his ongoing internal conflict with the feeling he's getting old and gentrified, and maybe even a little emasculated.
• Jerry Spinelli's Fourth Grade Rats sees peer pressure for boys to pack no sandwiches that don't have meat in them.
• 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 The Quest to go hunting because they "need" to eat meat.
• Known Space: Real 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). And to make it even more manly, they eat raw meat. When fresh meat is not available, they heat it up to about living temperature.
• In Ringworld humanity on the Ring has branched out to fill many environmental niches. The group from space captures the leader of one tribe who is infuriated by the Kzin suggesting he is a coward because he eats grass. The human member thinks it reveals that the Kzin has never met an angry bull.
• Alluded to in The Shining Ones, when Mirtai and Kring discover the picnic lunch Sarabian's servants packed for them is some sort of poultry.
  Mirtai: We're both warriors, my betrothed. We're supposed to eat red meat.
• One of the most literal examples of all time in The Stormlight Archive. Alethi men eat meat, spiced food, and other thick, hearty fare. Women eat sweet food, fruit, and other similar dishes. This is not a matter of choice. It is considered abhorrent in their culture for men to eat women's food or vice versa.
• Right in Chapter 3 of The Time Machine: "Save me some of that mutton. I'm starving for a bit of meat." Considering he'd just gotten back from the Eloi's fruitarian diet of 802701, his appetite is understandable.
• In the Young Bond novel SilverFin. Hellebores Sr. and Jr. are sitting down, having an all-red meat dinner, and it makes the son think of his mother, whose past influence in the household used to provide more varied meals. Even though it takes place in the 1920s, older Hellebore is consistently shown to be retrograde throughout the whole book.

Live-Action TV

• Jim and his brother-in-law from According to Jim proudly live by this trope, though said brother-in-law would try (or pretend to try) to have a vegetarian diet if his date does it herself.
• Parodied in a sketch from The Armstrong and Miller Show where a king is hosting a massive banquet for the man of honor, but he doesn't really like the food and so he says he'll just eat his couscous he's brought in a Tupperware box. He gets called out on this and says he'll gorge on the very next dish: a large roasted wild boar with an apple in its mouth. He leans over, grabs the apple, and takes a bite, then complains that it's a Granny Smith apple.
• Xander to Anya in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "Yes. Men like sports. Men watch the Action Movie. They eat of the beef and enjoy to look at the bosoms. A thousand years of avenging our wrongs and that's all you've learnt?"
• Earl was astounded when his son, Robbie, became a vegetarian. Since they are Dinosaurs — specifically, megalosauri, which are bipedal carnivores similar to the more familiar Tyrannosaurus rex — it is treated like a gay/fantastic drug sort of thing.
• In the Doctor Who episode "Amy's Choice", one of the Dream Lord's insults implies this:
  "[Y]ou're probably a vegetarian, you big flop-haired wuss."
  • Crosses over with Continuity Nod: the Doctor became a vegetarian at the end of "The Two Doctors." It didn't stick, though: the Ninth Doctor enjoyed a steak dinner with Margaret Slitheen in "Boom Town."
• On Home Improvement, Tim and Al build "The Man's Kitchen", which is designed to cook only two vegetables, beans, and potatoes. Meat, however? It has its own butcher shop! Unfortunately, the butcher nearly drowns when Tim shows off the kitchen's self-cleaning feature.
• On several occasions the hosts of The Man Show would crack jokes at the expense of vegetarians.
• On Married... with Children, Al believes this, and early-season episodes often put him into Meat Versus Veggies conflicts with Marcie. (It should be noted, Al is not the macho muscleman most entries on this Trope suggest; other "real man" traits Al believes, by the way, is using a toilet with as loud a flush as possible, not brushing your teeth, and not bathing, while trying to do things associated with the traditional image tend to get him hurt, arrested, or both. He's really not the type of guy a "real man" should admire.)
• Money Heist: Bogota's a tough guy who complains when they are served vegetables on Stockholm's birthday, even if she is vegan. He extols going out to eat meat with friends, saying it brings people together.
• On NCIS, Kate brings some tofu-veggie wraps to the office during "Black Water", saying that she and Abby eat them for lunch all the time. The guys can't get through one bite before throwing the ones that were offered to them out.
• Big Eater Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation planned a junket trip to Indianapolis around visiting his favorite steakhouse. The discovery that it had been shut down sent him into full-blown Heroic BSoD. He consoles himself by eating his other favorite food, breakfast, ordering all the bacon and eggs in a diner.
  • Ron got on well with Andy after Andy recommended a burrito place for lunch — Ron cuts his suggestion short with "You had me at 'Meat Tornado'.
  • Although he likes fishing, Ron won't eat fish because "Fish is practically a vegetable."
  • Ron is also the inventor of the "Turf N'Turf": a 16-ounce T-bone steak served with a 24-ounce porterhouse steak. That's two and a half pounds^note or a little over 1.13 kilograms, for you metric-using Commies in not-America of meat in one sitting, folks.
  • There's also his reaction to finding out about Gyro meat
    Ron: There's a hot, spinning cone of meat in that Greek restaurant next door. I don't know what it is, but I'd like to eat the whole thing.
• According to one episode of The Red Green Show, Dalton Humphrey only eats meat.
  • The sketch in which they revealed that is something of a subversion of the trope. That's because Red was trying to get Dalton to guess the word 'vegetable'; after thirty seconds of false starts, Red got Dalton to (successfully) complete the sentence "Your father ate nothing but red meat for seventy years and now he's a....."
• Used as a Spoof Aesop in RoboCop: The Series; while in prison, the Mad Scientist Dr. Cray-Z, who happens to be a vegetarian, watches an animated commercial in which an atypical, muscular, square-jawed superhero tells kids about the benefits of eating meat. (Ironically, RoboCop himself can't eat meat — or any solid food — at all.)
• In the Seinfeld episode "The Wink", Jerry goes on a vegetarian diet for health reasons and is worried that the Girl of the Week will not respect his virility.
• Supernatural: Dean Winchester's love of cheeseburgers and bacon contrasts with his brother Sam's more health-conscious diet consisting of salads and health shakes. In one episode, Dean attempts to fight fate by ordering a tofu burger, which he finds delicious, only to learn that the waitress brought him a bacon cheeseburger by mistake.
• That '70s Show: After Red Forman has a heart attack, he's forced to go on a low-protein diet. When Kitty gives him a salad, he says "This isn't food, this is what food eats."

Music

• The Scottish folk song "Tatties and Herrin" can be seen as an inversion, though it also invokes National Stereotypes:
  Fan the queen's wantin' men tae gang fecht wi' her foes
  It's nae tae the roast beef devourers she goes
  But awa' tae the north amongst the brave and the darin
  Tae the lads that were brocht up on tatties and herrin'
• Mentioned in The Reverend Horton Heat's "Eat Steak:"
  Cowpokes'll come from a near and far
  When you throw a few rib-eyes on the fire
  Roberto Duran ate two before a fight
  'Cause it gave a lot of mighty men a lot of mighty might
• The Jimmy Buffett song "Cheeseburger in Paradise" is about a man who tries to go vegetarian for health reasons but keeps having "tremulous dreams" about cheeseburgers.
• "I am Cow", by the Arrogant Worms, in a humourous ditty, extols the value of cows, including the eating of them:
  I am cow
  Hear me moo
  I weigh twice as much as you
  And I look good on the barbecue!

Newspaper Comics

• In Garfield, Irma's Diner offers the "He-Man hamburger", which is a five-pound patty of ground beef on a bun.
  Jon: Five pounds? Who could eat such a thing?
  (Garfield jumps on the table and does a Primal Chest-Pound)

Professional Wrestling

• Delirious will talk about eating raw meat at times during promos. At CHIKARA Bruised, October 26, 2007, he started Incoherence's (himself and Hallowicked) post-match promo after they defeated Team F.I.S.T. (Icarus and Chuck Taylor [subbing for Gran Akuma]) for the CHIKARA Campeonatos de Parejas (tag team titles) by proclaiming "Break out the sparkling water and the raw meat because Incoherence have become the Campeones de Parejas!" Four months earlier, at All Premier/PWE Zero to Sixty on June 24th, he told Chris Jericho that he was getting paid in raw meat. (Delirious may at times qualify as an Unreliable Narrator.)

Stand-Up Comedy

• Ron White has a low opinion of vegetarianism. Witness this conversation between him and a vegetarian friend:
  Friend: I feel nauseous and I have a headache. I think that vegetable soup I had for lunch must've had beef broth in it.
  Ron: Your system's kickin' back...broth? You're a manly man, aren't you?

Video Games

• During Bang's gag reel in BlazBlue: Chronophantasma, round four of the King of Men competition is an all-you-can-meat spectacular. Much to his misfortune, Jin is a vegetarian and is eliminated in short order this round. Azrael mocks him for it, hence this trope.
  Jin: Ugh... I cannot eat meat... how unfortunate... *collapses*
  Azrael: Fool. How can you call yourself a man if you cannot consume flesh?
• Mister Torgue of Borderlands 2 doesn't seem to care if you don't eat meat or eat things other than meat (he has vending machines that only dispense cookies, averting Real Men Hate Sugar). However, he doesn't like people who eat fake meat, and one of the conditions for signing up for his tournament is that you must forfeit your legal right to eat tofu (as well as several other rights such as your right to watch Chick Flicks).
• In several of the Castlevania games, health is regenerated by finding power-ups that resemble a pot roast, sirloin, or roast turkey.
• Destroy All Humans!: Parodied — the farmers in the Turnipseed Farm area will have thoughts about how much they love eating steak when you read their minds, but just as often will think about how they're tired of eating beef all the time and would like a salad or some tofu.
• A gender-flipped version comes from Disgaea 2, with Rozalin. During the beginning intro to Chapter 7, as the team's getting ready to head to bed, she admits to wanting "a nice, bloody prime rib", and when Etna talks about the reason she ditched Laharl (him eating her pudding), Etna claims sweets are a girl's best friend, to which Rozalin shoots her down with "I really don't like sweets. I'm more of a meat eater." The manga adaptation explores this a bit more, as when she got a cake as a child, it was WAY too sweet for her, which lead to her dislike of sweet things altogether.
  • Might be intended a clue that's she's actually Zenon, whose original gender is unknown and might be masculine, trapped in the body she's using since Real Men Hate Sugar in Japan.
• In Don't Starve, Wigfrid is the tomboy variation of this trope. Even when she is starving, trying to feed her non-meat items will cause her to flail her arms and yell, "This fööd is nöt fit för a warriör!" Her rework gave her the ability to eat honey-based foods, and those made from Leafy Meat, which she declares is "clöse enöugh".
• Ensemble Stars!: Adonis eats a lot of meat and often encourages other characters to do so in order to grow big and strong like he did. Likewise, his fellow UNDEAD teammate Kouga is a hot-blooded and competitive self-proclaimed lone wolf who loves eating raw meat.
• In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance Ike's favorite food is (spicy) meat, along with him being a Big Eater. This trait tends to be Flanderized in fan works to the point where readers might think all he ever did was eat and occasionally swing a sword.
  Ike: I'll pass on the desserts... But I'll take extra helpings of meat!
• The charr in Guild Wars 2 don't waste time with many earthly pleasures, but good meat is one that they utterly love, men and women alike. As Cat Folk, they're exclusively carnivorous, and the only known charr holiday is called Meatoberfest.
• Jack T. Ladd in Guilty, even when hungry, turns down bread and potatoes. He needs his fats and proteins!
• In the Mass Effect 3 DLC The Citadel, during the party Wrex can at one point be found advocating not only for an all-meat diet but for an all-Thresher Maw diet. Joker and Cortez are not impressed.
• Persona:
  • Akihiko Sanada from Persona 3 loves meals with high protein, one of his favorites being beef bowl.
    • In Persona 4: Arena, Akihiko's enjoyment of protein gets exaggerated to a near obsessive love for it. Likewise, Chie's love of meat is also exaggerated, leading to her receiving the tagline, "The Carnivore that Discarded Womanhood".
  • Ryuji Sakamoto from Persona 5 absolutely loves meat, as shown during the Phantom Thieves victory meal at a high-end hotel, where he tries to eat all the meat dishes on the menu. And in The Royal, him and Yusuke's team attack involves him stopping in the middle of the fight to eat a beef bowl.
• 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 his 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.
• More or less alluded to in the Tales Series. Sometimes different characters make different recipes with different ingredients, and often characters have a preference for certain foods. Some of the manly men who prefer beef in their dishes include Lloyd, Flynn, and... er... Anise...
• Team Fortress 2:
  • Saxton Hale seen here.
  • Also, one Power-Up for the Heavy is the Buffalo Steak Sandvich, which is not actually a sandwich, but just steak. ("Who needs bread?")
  • Also, the Soldier, as "digesting ribs" is on his list of four things men should be engaged in at all times.
• Super Mario Bros.: Fittingly for a boisterous meathead, Bowser is shown to enjoy it a lot - meat on the bone is even used as his answer to Mario and friends' mushrooms in both The Thousand-Year Door's Bowser levels and in the form of drumsticks as his healing items in Bowser's Inside Story. Dream Team has Bowser also eating meat in order to grow larger so he can defeat the Mario Brothers. It comes up in conversation when he meets the Squiggler from the Wiggler Family Farm in Bowser's Inside Story game, which reveals he's the veggie-hating kind.
  "Vegetables are GROSS! Don't you have any meat?!"

Visual Novels

• Averted with the protagonist of Double Homework. Although he is not a vegetarian, his athlete’s diet is conspicuously low on animal protein, which is mostly represented by eggs.

Webcomics

• It's slightly more complicated than real men (due to a society of animals), but in Kevin & Kell, carnivores are expected to be carnivores and herbivores are expected to be herbivores. If one becomes 'trans-diet', as Bruno had, he can expect prejudice and accusations of betraying his kind.
• One of the things Seymour does on Sin Fest to get more manly is eat a steak, which is drawn to look pretty rare.
• In El Goonish Shive, Elliot's father reacts to his son changing back after a Gender Bender incident with a comment to eat some meat to celebrate.

Web Original

• A recurring theme on The Best Page in the Universe.
• Epic Meal Time has this but it was subverted for Fanservice in Massive Meat Log and it was played straight when they bring the girls in to eat dessert in The Black Legend.
  • And in one episode of the parody series Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time, the chef "accidentally" makes a salad. When he realizes this, he gets pissed off. Even more than he usually is.
• Parodied in Frozen Fifties Man by Bill Racehate, an obsessively manly white supremacist who preserves his masculinity by consuming red meat every thirty minutes. He eventually commits suicide when he accidentally eats a soy burger.
• James Lileks' skewering of a meat cookbook.
• LoadingReadyRun`s "Man Cooking" sections. In a nice case of deliberately Comically Missing the Point, they once did a vegetarian episode, which involved making and cooking a giant mushroom shape. Out of meat.
• One recurring joke of the Overly Manly Man meme is that he thinks salad is what food eats to become food.
• In "20 Ways to Lose Your Man Card" by Matthew Santoro, Matthew says that all men, with the exception of ones who have freak conditions where they're poisoned by meat, should eat meat, or else they're not manly.
• Parodied by The Nostalgia Critic in his review of Demolition Man, as he's in a "really wants to be a man" mood and so eats a heart.
• SCP Foundation: Testing with SCP-458 (a magic pizza box that generates the favourite pizza of whoever opens it) has shown that SCP-076-2's favourite pizza is a large thick-crusted pizza topped with meatballs, pepperoni, bacon, Canadian bacon, sausage, and hamburger meat. To wit, SCP-076-2 "Able" is basically Guts with the psychosis and badassery ramped up. Manly man, manly pizza.
• Averted by Thug Kitchen, a whole-foods vegan cooking blog that uses gangsta stereotypes and copious profanity. Real men don't need meat or overly processed dairy products.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Sokka 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 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).
  • In the Fire Nation, even the meat eats meat.
• In the Bounty Hamster episode "Fashion Victim", though she's not a man, Cassie claims "Vegetarianism's for wimps!" which her partner Marion, himself a vegetarian, takes offense to.
• King of the Hill:
  • Hank Hill, who is appalled when his son Bobby temporarily becomes vegetarian to impress a girl. In another episode, when sarcastically asked "How many cows does your family eat in a year" he replies "Wait, we figured this out once..."
  • This was Deconstructed in one episode when Hank's high meat low fiber diet left him with bad constipation that actually threatened his health.
  • For Hank, not only do real men eat meat, but they only eat it medium-rare.
    Hank: Firm, but with a little give. Yup. These are medium rare.
    Bobby: What if somebody wants theirs well done?
    Hank: We ask them politely yet firmly to leave.
• My Gym Partner's a Monkey: Made fun of when Adam invites Amazon Kevin to Darwin Middle School, a hyper-masculine rugged adventurer who advertises cereal made of miniature pieces of meat that turn red when dipped in milk.
• Lampshaded in The Powerpuff Girls (1998) when a boy claims eating the flesh of lesser animals is manly. His father agrees but then is made to eat his vegetables by his wife.
• Ren & Stimpy:
  • Ren volunteers to be 'fake dad' to problem-child Kowalski, who looks like the scariest guy in prison. At a picnic, Kowalski requests a meat-on-meat sandwich washed down with a glass of meat.
  • In "Lair of the Lummox", Stimpy angers the Lummox by rejecting its offer of meat by saying he's a vegetarian.
• In the South Park episode "Fun with Veal", Stan refuses to eat meat after saving some baby calves from a meat plant, which causes him to break out in sores that turn out to be miniature vaginas. This is apparently an actual disease called "vaginaitis", and if not stopped (by eating meat naturally enough) will progress until the infected "becomes one big pussy".
• In the Teen Titans episode "The Beast Within", Beast Boy devours Robin's entire breakfast of one whole ham plus eggs, claiming that real men don't eat tofu. This is actually the first sign that something is wrong with Beast Boy since he's a vegetarian-bordering-on-vegan.
• Yam Roll of Yam Roll becomes quite offended at a restaurant when the waitress tells him that they don't serve short ribs and offers him strawberry shortcake instead.

Real Life

• As it saw the universe as a living, Pantheistic order where everything has its place and hierarchy, the philosophical school of Stoicism, which emphasized dignity and manliness, was distinctly omnivorous in a time when some other schools, like Pythagoreans and some Platonists, spoused vegetarianism (albeit not necessarily for reasons relatable today).^note Pythagoreans believed that souls reincarnated, often from humans to animals and vice versa, and thus considered it a crime for you to eat a fellow human. For his part, Plato favored vegetarian food because at the time meat was a luxury and he was generally against those.
• Interestingly, even a Friend to All Living Things like Friedrich Nietzsche believed that vegetarianism was bad for the human spirit (not just men), but his philosophy definitely emphasized manliness (although Nietzsche's definition of "manly" is much more cerebral/Apollonian than most people's); he specifically calls it a cause of "physiological inhibition" in On the Genealogy of Morals.
• Another straight example: Ted Nugent, who provides the page quote, basically subsists on a meat diet and yet remains healthy as a horse.
• Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead. By his own admission, the only plant matter he'd even consider touching was potatoes and green beans, and otherwise lived on a diet of mostly meat, cheese, and Jack Daniel's. Amazingly, he was quite healthy for being in his late 60s (aside from the terminal cancer, obviously) and is well-known for his music that appeals to men and for allegedly bedding over 2,000 women in his life.
• This story from FMyLife.com:
  Today, I realized my father-in-law is basically Ron Swanson, when at a barbecue he ate some of my daughter's vegan sausages by mistake. When I told him they were vegan, he went to the bathroom, forced himself to throw them up, then sat and demolished 4 burgers, 8 sausages, and 6 chicken thighs, "LIKE A REAL MAN!"
• The vegetarian version of a dish often gets a feminine version of the name, such as shepherdess pie to shepherd's pie or croque-mademoiselle to croque monsieur.

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