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Certainly, there is nothing wrong with a family barbecue in which Dad grills the steak and Mom makes the side dishes or prepares the desert. This is how generations of people have shared food and experiences. However, according to authors, researchers and scientists, the socialized association we draw between masculinity and meat – and the further gendering of our food consumption – poses several risks to how we perceive one another, our predilection toward tribalism and the nutrition we derive from our food choices.

When it was first published almost three decades ago,The New York TimescalledThe Sexual Politics of Meat(Bloomsbury Academic) “a bible of the vegan community.” Meanwhile, conservative pundits such as Rush Limbaugh denigrated it as they claimed to “love-hating it.”

Author Carol J. Adams says that, at the time, some regarded her book as commentary on a passing trend. Twenty-eight years later, the connections she made between carnivorism and the perception of virility in the Western world have only become more reinforced. ”In the culture that we’re living in right now, there is a slippery and deliberate confusion concerning who or what we’re eating. And it ties misogyny to oppression of animals,” says Adams.

As Adams posited inThe Sexual Politics of Meat, both women and animals are commonly presented in popular media as entities to be consumed. In her latest book, Burger (Bloomsbury Academic), she uses Hustler’s June 1978 cover as an example of the phenomenon. The infamous magazine front bears a “Last all meat issue—Prime—Grade ‘A’ Pink” meat inspection stamp and a quote from founder Larry Flynt: “We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat” (no doubt in response to concerns voiced by feminists at the time). The lower half of a naked, well-oiled woman is pictured protruding from a meat grinder, her head and torso presumably already minced.