Real (White) Men Eat Meat: How Vegetarianism Went Mainstream

A few weeks ago, I discussed the paleo diet and how it further substantiates the eponymous worldview:

The SWPL media has been all too willing to promulgate this lie [about fats being inimical to one's health]. They do so because meat eating has become synonymous with traditional and masculine culture, the bane of the liberal media.

While nutrition would seem independent of politics, the social aspects of food choices weaken such a distinction. On stuffwhitepeoplelike, Christian Lander notes this correspondence:

As with many white people activities, being vegan/vegetarian enables them to feel as though they are helping the environment AND it gives them a sweet way to feel superior to others...as they will talk about how they cannot eat anything and would rather that the meat and cheese be thrown in the garbage than put into their bodies.

Yet these ostentatious displays of nutritious haughtiness (ever known a vegetarian who didn't inform you of this) would seem at best only tenuously connected to other aspects of liberalism. However, if one understands the gradual politicization of science and its use as a social tool against traditional white culture, the motivation for nutrition dissembling becomes evident.

Science was once the domain of dispassionate truth seekers, largely removed from the social biases that dictate public discourse. But following the 1960's mandate of racial egalitarianism, liberal creationists viewed the ostensible gaps in scientific achievement as a potent means of undermining presumed institutional racism. Thus, no longer would institutional science serve as the ultimate symbolism of national hegemony or the romantic goal of our most astute minds. Instead, politicians and social revolutionaries see science as an empirically based but socially pliable aspect of the culture war.

Each polemical issue tacitly connected to scientific inquiry, the biological, environmental, and spiritual, is perverted in a manner as to frame whites and traditional Western culture as pernicious and uncouth and reflexive opposition to it as enlightened and beneficial. For example, the global warming charade elicits ire towards the productive, yet apparently toxic West while painting Africans and other depressed peoples as noble savages living harmoniously with nature. On this site, I needn't note the rampant silencing of racial and gender HBD. Finally, liberals accept a truncated version of evolution not as a reflection of genuine intellectual inquiry, but as a mean to discern the dignified from the ignorant masses.

And now back to nutrition. The typifying Western diet, especially the pre-60's Norman Rockwell depiction, includes large portions of meat. In a 1978 book, Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin sum up the contention that meat eating corresponds with traditional and masculine culture:

Women’s social standing is roughly equal to men’s only when society itself is not formalized around roles for distributing meat.

So meat eating evokes the pre-60's era, traditional meals for Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving, male-dominated hunting, and Western disconnect from the carb and starch-laden diets of Asia, South America, and Africa. Additionally, those that champion vegetarianism are generally similarly ardent supporters of alternative medicines, an explicit denunciation of the allopathic medicine central to the West. For these individuals, the hocus pocus balderdash of indigenous peoples acts as a proxy for the empirically-based methods of Western science. Note the preponderance of anti-vaccine and other pseudo-science promulgated by the Huffington Post. The foremost "luminary" of the alternative medicine community, Andrew Weil, repudiated modern medicine early in his career, instead studying under a Sioux shaman:

After a one-year internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco in 1968-69, he left the world of allopathic medicine entirely, to go off to an Indian reservation in South Dakota to study with a Sioux medicine man and learn about herbal medicine and ritual healing. "On the reservation," he says, "I participated in sweat lodge ceremonies, grew a beard, and `dropped out.'" At home afterward, "I started to practice yoga, experiment with vegetarianism, and learn to meditate.

[The Natural Mind] is a startling document -- a sharply drawn manifesto of New Age biology, a direct challenge to the scientific basis of conventional medicine, and a revealing window on Weil's style of thought.

I discussed the foundation of these beliefs in a posts on the noble savage phenomenon:

Thus, the oppressed non-whites and their noble savage wisdom must possess truths not readily available to the privileged Westerners. Further, the stodgy portrayal of Western science, with its empirical testing and data, speaks to a coldness perpetrated by an oppressive white ruling class. Contrastingly, the non-whites possess an exotic quality closer to the spiritual basis of man, not besmirched by the racist, classist, and sexist West.

With all these social forces acting in concert, the spurious claims of the pro-carb, anti-meat, anti-fat cohort find favor in our cultural and social landscape. The status seeking media will inundate the credulous public with any paradigm, no matter its veracity, if its foundational maxims connect to a non-white, progressive agenda. And we're all suffering as a result.

[Disclaimer: Bacon is processed meat so it's not paleo. But it was the only hot girl/meat photo I could find.]