(Der Tagesspiegel, October 24, 2025)

Nils Althaus

They eat almost twice as much meat as women, invoke the Stone Age, and balk at veggie schnitzel. Is men’s appetite for meat an expression of learned machismo—or a biological necessity?

Men’s reputation has seen better days. Not only do they account for an alarming share of history’s dictators and go down too easily on the soccer field, they also eat far too much meat—more than three times the recommended amount, on average. As many as 30 percent of German men eat steak, sausage, or other meat every day. That is bad for animals, the environment, and the men themselves. By comparison, only 16 percent of German women eat meat daily. Around the world, women consume considerably less of it and are more likely to be vegetarian or vegan.

Explanations abound, particularly if you place your faith in the collective wisdom of nutrition influencers and their comment sections: Men are born hunters; maintaining their muscle mass requires protein by the pawful; vegetables make men sick, weak, and unattractive; and, while we are at it, oatmeal lowers testosterone levels. (It does not.) So what really lies behind men’s appetite for meat?

“What we eat is a social and cultural question. In the nineteenth century, work inside and outside the home became increasingly separate. Factory work, coded as male, was considered physically demanding; reproductive labor, coded as female, was not,” says Martin Winter, a sociologist of food at Fulda University of Applied Sciences. The toiling man was henceforth rewarded with meat, which rising prosperity had made more widely available. “Before the Industrial Revolution, the dividing lines ran more between social classes than between the sexes.” Unlike a noblewoman, a male servant simply had no access to meat.

Today, meat is often symbolically associated with strength, dominance, and virility. Eating it is not merely a dietary choice but also a way of performing masculinity. You do not have to scroll far to find examples. From muscle-bound carnivores like Shawn Baker, who eat nothing but meat, to the artery-clogging YouTube hits “Burgerpommes 1,” “Burgerpommes 2,” and the “Burgerpommes Show Song”—search at your own risk—to Bavarian premier Markus Söder’s latest sausage offensive, masculinity and meat appear as inseparable as greasy fingers and paper napkins. Scientific studies also point to a connection: Men who endorse the use of physical violence and place great importance on sex, for example, tend to eat more meat.

Could biological factors underlie this cultural phenomenon? Men unquestionably have a higher proportion of muscle mass, and animal protein helps maintain it. As prehistoric hunters, they may also have needed to replenish depleted fat and glycogen stores in the evening with energy-dense food.

More Muscle, More Animal Protein?

For people today, whose only big-game hunts take place at Aldi or Lidl, those considerations are beside the point. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has said for years that a well-planned vegan diet can fully meet an athlete’s protein needs. Exceptional vegan athletes such as Patrick Baboumian, Serena Williams, and Lewis Hamilton provide the practical proof. But today’s selectively bred foods bear little resemblance to those of the Stone Age. Prehistoric wheat concealed its tiny kernels inside a tough husk, corn was a scrawny wild grass, and eggplants were small, prickly, and bitter. Given that menu, meat stood out as the more nutrient-dense option.

If compelling biological reasons once required men to eat more meat, that difference ought to appear in the archaeological record. Yet the evidence is mixed. Isotope analyses from the 6,000-year-old necropolis of Barmaz in Switzerland suggest that the men and women buried there consumed similar amounts of meat. Roman gladiators lived largely on beans and grains. Traditional societies today—often treated as models for prehistoric communities—also offer examples of relatively equal meat consumption. The Tsimane in Bolivia and the Martu in Australia, for instance, share the spoils of a hunt equally. Contrary evidence exists as well, but on the whole, the idea that prehistoric men necessarily required more meat than women rests on shaky ground.

Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer

The familiar image of a strict division of labor between hunting men and gathering women is also facing growing scrutiny. In an influential 2023 paper, anthropologists Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock argued that women participated in hunting more extensively than previously assumed. Female physiology, for example, gave women advantages in endurance activities such as long-distance running, while men’s bodies were better suited to speed and strength. Both capacities, they argued, would have mattered in hunting.

Perhaps the real question is not why men eat more meat, but why women eat less. Meat had drawbacks even in prehistoric times. In particular, it was far more likely than plant foods to harbor pathogens or parasites. Slaughtered big game lay around and could easily spoil. Eating an entire mammoth without refrigeration would be a logistical feat even today. Because of the female reproductive cycle, Stone Age women may have been especially vulnerable to these dangers.

A Cyclical Aversion to Meat

After ovulation and during pregnancy, parts of the female immune system are dialed down to prevent the body from mistakenly attacking the developing child, half of whose genetic material is foreign. Infections are especially dangerous during this vulnerable period. According to anthropologist Daniel Fessler, eating less meat may therefore have evolved as a protective adaptation, helping women avoid infection while their immune defenses were weakened. Indeed, food aversions during pregnancy are directed mainly at animal products—particularly meat, poultry, fish, and eggs.

Men, then, lack what might be called a cyclical aversion to meat. Traditional norms also stand in the way of bringing men’s meat consumption closer to women’s. How do you win over a man who feels truly masculine only when he is standing in carcinogenic clouds of smoke, using barbecue tongs to flip animal carcasses back and forth?

Veggie Sausage—Sorry…

“Anyone who wants to change men’s eating habits must find ways to work with masculine identity rather than against it,” says Elise Hankins of the Bristol-based research organization Bryant Research, who has studied how gender norms affect meat consumption. Her latest study offers concrete recommendations for appealing to men with traditional ideas about masculinity. Advertising, for instance, should not explicitly promote plant-based foods as masculine, but subtly associate them with values such as performance, strength, and adventure. One could imagine a commercial featuring Markus Söder fighting his way through the jungle armed with a celery stalk, strangling one tiger after another with it—without eating their flesh.

Alongside subtly masculine advertising, the authors argue, it would also help if plant-based alternatives could continue using terms associated with meat. The European Parliament, however, recently rejected that idea. Names such as “veggie sausage” and “soy schnitzel” could soon be banned. That is unfortunate, but in a way it also represents a victory for animal protection—at least for the endangered species of carnivorous male who, despite possessing basic reading skills, arrives at the Lidl checkout bewildered and overwhelmed by a meatless sausage—sorry, a plant-based shaft. The guiding hand of government will, one hopes, gently shepherd this fragile creature back to its natural habitat: the cardiologist’s office.