"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's Bullshit, S2 episode 1
That cow? Food. That dog?
Food. That grizzly bear? Food.
If you're a man, eat food. 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 about meat, and the bigger, redder, bloodier the better. Chicken and (
most) fish barely qualify as manly meat, but if the guy is eating poultry, you can bet it's a big greasy drumstick. If it's fish, he probably got it with dynamite. The other end of the spectrum goes up to
deer, bears, dinosaurs and anything bigger, depending on the setting.
It never occurs to them that meat is simply part of a complete meal involving salad, meat (hallal if necessary), vegetables, dairy products and fruit.
If a
girl is a carnivore, it's to show that she's
tomboyish.
A subtrope of
Testosterone Poisoning. Related to
Manly Men Can Hunt and
A Real Man Is A Killer. Unrelated to
Large Ham.
Examples:
- Sokka from Avatar The Last Air Bender is obsessed with meat (in contrast to vegetarian Aang).
- Lampshaded in Powerpuff Girls 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.
- 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 and Obelix both really like their roast boar.
- Luffy, the Hot Blooded pirate captain of One Piece, has an obsession with meat and hates vegetables.
- In an episode of South Park, not eating meat caused one of the boys to grow multiple vaginas.
- The fishing scene in Waterworld.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 bore 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.
- Zardoz. The Exterminators are outraged when their god tells them to grow grain.
- Hunny of 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.
- James Lileks' skewering of a meat cookbook
.
- Saxton Hale here.
- 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.."
- Real kzin eat met. At least, modern male kzin do.
Real Life:
