Here’s a little experiment my partner and I have been running for the last five years: We go to a restaurant with table service. He orders, say, the squash risotto, being a vegetarian. I, a murderous omnivore, order the pork chop. Then we sit back to see how often we end up switching plates when our server returns.

We haven’t kept official records, but I’d say I’m handed the squash roughly 85 percent of the time (excepting extremely fine dining, where I’m fairly sure you’re taken out back and force-fed McNuggets should you make such an error). I don’t blame the hard-working people bringing me my food. They’re busy juggling multiple tables, and, in the majority of cases, their instinct probably would have been right; in my years working in the food service industry, I’m certain I made the same gamble. If you have to guess, you assume the hunk of protein is for the dude.

MEATHOOKED: THE HISTORY AND SCIENCE OF OUR 2.5-MILLION-YEAR OBSESSION WITH MEAT by Marta Zaraska Basic Books, pp. 272, $26.99

Why does the consumption of animal flesh strike us as somehow inherently masculine? As journalist Marta Zaraska explains in Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession With Meat, it’s complicated. For one thing, the advertising industry gives full credence to this idea. To give just one of Zaraska’s examples: A pre-economic crash Hummer commercial showed a man, having just been shamed at the grocery store for buying tofu and carrots, heading off to buy the massive vehicle. The tagline then appears: “Restore the balance.” In case that was too subtle for you, the original line was, “Restore your manhood.”

These ads spring in part from traditions and symbols that stretch back millennia. Big pieces of grilled meat—which cannot be made from the tough, cheaper parts of an animal—have long been associated with abundance, unlike the stringy, chewy bits that were available for the poor and were braised for hours until tender by women. As Zaraska writes, “Thus grilling became associated with wealth and with celebrations, and that is also why grilling is for guys and stooping over a pot of stew is for women—the first one is prestigious, the second one is not.”

And there’s the fact that my partner is over a foot taller than I am; due to some unfortunate nineteenth-century bunk science, conventional wisdom holds that a person of such stature would need vast amounts of protein to have achieved that height. In other words, at play in that snap decision is an international meat industry worth billions, a lifetime of advertising, millennia of tradition, deep-rooted cultural symbolism, and decades of misunderstood science. And that goes into not just this decision, but millions of others as people around the world choose, over and over again, to eat meat.