On Eating Animals

Eating meat is bad for animals, the planet, and humanity — and, despite what they may think, it’s especially bad for the men themselves.

If we replace “meat” with any other food item, the absurdity of our circumstance becomes obvious. Imagine, for a moment, if men felt the same way about cantaloupes. Imagine if we lived in a world where men arbitrarily coveted cantaloupes as a source of masculine energy. Imagine if men prepared bowls of cantaloupe to comfort themselves whenever their manhood was questioned. Imagine if men who chose not to eat cantaloupes were viewed as feminine and meek, and men who consumed all-cantaloupe diets were admired as alpha males. We live at the same heights of insanity, we’re just too acclimated to notice our altitude.

This bizarre male obsession with meat might seem to be a harmless expression of fragility, but it has real consequences. Meat consumption is the number one cause of animal cruelty worldwide, and eating animals is a contributing factor to climate change, world hunger, antibiotics resistance, deforestation, worker exploitation, indigenous land theft, pollution, mass extinction, water usage, zoonotic diseases — I could go on. If cantaloupes were causing these problems, would they still be on the shelves?

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Ironically, meat isn’t even good for the traits we usually define as masculine. Testosterone levels — perhaps more than any other measurable, physical trait — are synonymous with masculinity in the popular imagination. This is understandable since testosterone is what causes males to develop deeper voices, facial hair, increased muscular strength, as well as higher sperm production and sex drive; if anything physical can be called “manly,” testosterone can. And yet, despite what one might expect, vegans have higher testosterone than meat-eaters: A large study published in the British Journal of Cancer showed that vegan men have 13% higher testosterone levels than omnivorous ones. From a hormonal perspective, vegan men are the manliest on earth.

Despite this evidence, Dr. Shawn Baker — a famous advocate of Jordan Peterson’s carnivore diet, who has made a career out of attacking vegans online — has proudly suggested that an all-meat diet may increase testosterone. And in the past, he has argued that the drop in American male testosterone levels since the 1970s is possibly caused by the corresponding reduction in red meat intake over that same interval.

He has since stopped making this argument, and it’s no mystery why. Baker recently took a blood test that showed his own testosterone levels had plummeted on an all-meat diet. It turns out, eating dead animals wasn’t the best thing for his manhood. He reacted in a blog post as follows:

I tested a early am testosterone back in January low and behold, it was shockingly low!! 227 ng/dL. This falls below the normal range of 270–1070. How can this be as you are a big strong, lean guy who supposedly has excellent sexual function (I checked and I do). So how is this possible?

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Our goal as humans should not be to merely align our behavioral decisions with the stereotypes of whatever sex or gender we happen to be. Instead, we should seek to behave in a way that reduces meaningless misery and brings joy to ourselves and the lives of others.

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