British Beef vs. French Foppery
British Beef vs. French Foppery
The high steaks of identity politics
Britain's national fortitude has been associated with voracious, masculine meat consumption for centuries. But now, the paradoxes at the heart of this relationship — namely its reliance on foreign resources and the subjugation of women and workers — are provoking an identity crisis. Writer Annie Dabb takes us on a journey from the heydays of the empire to the nadirs of straight Tinder to suggest new ways of thinking about what makes a British man.
By Annie Dabb | Premium subscribers have access to an audio reading of this piece on our podcast.
A slab of British beef on a plate for a Sunday roast dinner, or a traditional three fish and three meat course: plain, simple, and meaty. These cornerstones of English cuisine have endured for centuries.
Although they were at first glutinous indulgences for the wealthy Englishmen who could afford them, the intensification of domestic livestock production in the sixteenth century led such dishes to evolve into more class-redundant weekly traditions. The rise of “British Beef” created the self-perception that suddenly, England was not — as Napoleon would have it — a nation of shopkeepers, but of meat eaters. It was a self-perception that would indelibly configure British masculinity.
“For centuries, nation-building and national identity projects have focused on meat as a symbol of masculine virility and national strength,” writes Jack Hanlon. For the British, who conceived — and perhaps still conceive — of themselves as an “essentially ‘masculine’ culture”, concerned with forthrightness and rationality, this symbolism manifests in the “common sense” approach to how the British produce, prepare, and consume their meat.
Throughout the eighteenth century, the complex flavours and techniques of peasant dishes such as beef bourguignon or charcuterie were already earning the delectable French cuisine global prestige. But rather than admire France for the flavourful nuances of its gastronomy and its domestic dedication to the creation of culinary delights, Linda Colley has identified how, at this time, the other (and othered) European nation was constructed in British popular culture as essentially “effeminate”: too “preoccupied with high fashion, fine cuisine and etiquette” to achieve the same degree of industrial success to which Britain had long been aspiring.
In part, this construction was an obvious strategy to undermine any advantages France may have had in the nations’ ongoing geopolitical rivalry related to foreign commerce. Britain dealt in the brutal and lucrative trade of slaves and sugar, while France fared better in the fur trade. As a trading nation, Britain was rational and detached; French merchants, on the other hand, often traded, lived with, and married into Indigenous communities. This perceived despondency towards domination and exploitation was one that lent itself to associations with the softer female. And despite the undeniable presence of meat in French cuisine, British elites were determined to paint them as suffering from lack: William Hogarth, a well-known English painter and engraver, “depicted the French as famished from their vegetarian diet”.
For a while then, a heavily meat-based diet (of British beef in particular) was seen as fundamental to Britain’s imperial — and empirical — growth. It allowed the nation to define itself against what it was not: namely, France, with its lack of political liberty and abundance of vegetarian dandies. Essentially, imperial masculinity was anchored by British beef.
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But as Britain’s population, power, and wealth continued to grow, so did the country’s demand for meat — so much so that it surpassed the island nations’ capacity to produce it. By the nineteenth century, advancements in mechanical refrigeration meant that “dead meat” could be frozen and imported to Britain. It was first thought that this lower-quality (on account of its foreign origin) imported meat would satiate the working class, “while the middle and upper classes would continue to feast on British meat”; however, many working-class Brits rejected the imported meat based on the perception that “home-killed” produce was superior — just like Britain’s national character.
Nonetheless, by the 1930s, Britain had come to rely on imports to satiate more than half of its meat consumption. These products did indeed become the fuel of the working classes since the “economics of empire” made imported meat incredibly cheap. This hypocritical reliance on “inferior” imported produce as fuel for the labouring bodies responsible for the nation’s industrial growth exposes the lie that “British beef” was the source of the country’s strength. British national elitism relied on oppressed and exploited working-class bodies to sustain itself as an industrial and imperial superpower — yet its workers were exempt from the spoils of Britain’s economic growth and colonial expansion. This included working-class women who were doubly exploited in Britain’s drive to grow its empire; not only were women often wage earners in their own right, but also required to perform the role of “dutiful wives”, responsible for maintaining an orderly household and for conceiving, birthing, and rearing disciplined children who would go on to become the next generations of workers. All this, without the "reward" of "proper British beef".
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These days, for British women, beef might not be considered as much of a reward after all. It’s well-documented that the number of women opting for a vegetarian diet is on the rise. As Alexandra Sexton notes, far from a symbol of national progress and supremacy, meat has become “the stuff of climate change, food scares, cancer risks, and corporate cover-up in recent discourses.” Despite the slight shift in focus towards plant-based protein sources, the correlation between meat protein and a physically stronger body persists in modern-day Britain, including among athletes and gym-goers, in part because of the higher quality of animal protein compared to plant protein and the presence of creatine in meat products.
There’s somewhat of a subtext that meat=muscles, and muscles=sex. The emphasis on gendered ideals of aesthetic appearance in modern (sex) culture in particular has been exacerbated by capitalist dating apps, which operate a glance-and-swipe approach to human communication — what we might call dehumanized miscommunication for the purposes of efficient intercourse. This emphasis on sexualized aesthetic appearance also provides a link between sexuality and the modern meat market in the way that people present themselves to be efficiently consumed by one another. As a society, we presume that abstention from this corporeal trade, (like going out for dinner in a group as the sole vegan) makes you not only a bit awkward but also drastically limits your choice of partner (or dish, to extend the metaphor). Particularly if the restaurant you’re in, like straight Tinder, tends to be a bit of an unappealing sausage factory.
But if the sole purpose of men building muscle was to attract and protect women, then why have there been weightlifting competitions in the Royal Navy longer than there have been women in the armed forces? Eve Kofosky Sedgewick suggests that many men might build muscle (especially in extreme cases such as body building), to promote homosocial bonding, which allows them to build, maintain and protect the networks of power as a means of sustaining patriarchal privilege. In this way, masculine musculature can be regarded as a representation of men’s exceptionality. The muscles themselves are an achievement, which enables men to remain dominant over women through the establishment of an oppressive hierarchy — one literally defended by strong men. After all, conceptions of British masculinity — rooted in the phallic, virile, and meat-fuelled English body — rely on the idea of an antithetical, inferior female body.
As sociocultural contexts change, persistent meat-eating and communal muscle-building may be the final grandstands, the last attempts for British masculinity to dig in its heels. They are ways of positioning masculinity as a real, necessary, and moreover achievable (if you both consume and exert enough energy) thing, rather than a conceptual myth. Perhaps this is because there’s a lot of room to be proudly feminine, with ways of emotionally and socially reaffirming that femininity. Whereas, in recent discourse, masculinity has unfortunately developed a lot more negative connotations.
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Similarly to meat, many women are also eschewing white, beef-fuelled versions of British masculinity. More and more women are engaging in queer, interracial, or no relationships at all. These are, in a way, radical choices: they trouble the previous expectation that women would continue to participate in a “compulsory heterosexuality masquerading as erotic choice, in which not only personal relationships but an entire social order required women to function in complementary and symbiotic relation to men”.
As a larger cultural shift, this challenges a conception of British masculinity that has always been, and largely remains, predicated upon a binary social expectation of female subservience and attraction, in exchange for unsolicited male protection. Ever since men have fought wars with other men to access other countries’ resources (including women) while preventing other men from accessing their own, British men have built their identities around the protectionism of both queen (women) and country. But many women do not feel protected by this so-called “forthrightness and rational” masculine identity; they instead feel oppressed by the limitation this unsolicited protection entails. The most twisted version of this “protection” — male violence against women — is the biggest risk to women’s survival.
Yet access to meat and women’s bodies remain central reifiers of modern British masculinity. In 2023, a study into the meat-masculinity link highlighted how the consumption of meat and women are linked within traditional heterosexual frameworks of masculinity: one finding included that “men who believe it is acceptable to use violence and who place a high importance on sexual virility were the heaviest meat-eaters, whereas men who hold gender egalitarian views ate the least meat”. But the study further showed that even men who have transitioned to a completely plant-based diet — and rebuke the notion that a vegan diet is less masculine than a meat-based one — still seem to hold a narrow conceptualization of masculinity measured in terms of normative stereotypes, including the importance of straight men’s ability to protect, attract, and sexually perform for/with women.
These shallow lanes for expressing British masculinity result in fears of social emasculation that correlate with male body dysmorphia, incel culture, and harmful male emotional repression in modern society. All of these patriarchal pressures which men continue to face contribute to the ongoing “crisis of masculinity”.
One of the main culprits for the crisis of masculinity? The attempt to individually define oneself as a productive contributor in a fast-paced neoliberal society. Many men do this by misguidedly upholding the idea that masculinity rests on one’s ability to be a provider and protector. This idea is not only out of step with more modern and fluid forms of gender identity and expression, but it’s also unachievable for many men in Britain because of shifting economic and social realities. In this sense, the crisis is not a wholly new phenomenon, but rather the product of many decades of capitalist exploitation and points at which men have been made to feel like individual failures for being unable to live up to this “ideal”. However misguided, the idea that men’s purpose is to provide and protect is deeply embedded in British culture — as the history of how British national identity has been shaped around an inexorable link between rational masculinity and “progress” shows us.
In the UK, the crisis of masculinity manifests not only in the disproportionate rates of suicide and alcoholism among men but also in the rise in misogynistic rhetoric. For example, in the “manosphere” (an alt-right online men’s space), headed by the likes of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, misogyny is masqueraded under the guise of “being simply pro-male”. These men promote a specifically muscular, meat-fuelled mould of manhood. The “manosphere” provides men not only with a sense of purpose but with a structure and direction through the dual sexualization and scapegoating of women as a way of reinforcing a “strong masculinity” in response to the ongoing economic crisis.
At the same time, women — many of whom have had no other option but to cultivate their gender identity based on social networks and emotional connection, due to women’s historical exclusion from the public sphere — are demonstrating what many men need to understand: Being comfortable in your gender identity has more to do with values exterior to capitalist production, rather than how many steaks you can eat or women you can sleep with to demonstrate your industrial-style efficiency and prowess.
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It’s not the first time that British masculinity has found itself in crisis. The anxiety around the performance of authentic English masculinity was largely derived, as Leslie Jansen writes, from the British preoccupation with other nations’ perception of England, and the feared importation of “French fopperies” following a peace deal struck between France and Britain in 1802. This dissolving of divisions which had previously contributed to the construction of British masculinity on ideas of national pride, meat importation, and colonial domination, created — for at least the 14 months of peace that the treaty designated — an absence of antithetical trade power, making it more difficult for Britain to establish its national fortitude without an appropriate (inferior) comparison. What’s more, France’s equal trading power during this pause in the conflict also exposed the invalidity of supposed national “feminization” as a marker of weakness or inferiority.
The meat-masculinity nexus survived a few hundred years on shaky ground. But now, profound cultural shifts threaten not just a proprietorial loss for (white) men, but also a renunciation of the masculine identity dependent on antithetical female subjectivity and imperial domination of feminized nations. Men’s failure to carry out (unsolicited) protection, to attract, or even to access the bodies of women who prefer a vegetarian to a protein-powered English muffin, not only troubles the essentialism of an intentionally desirable and protective masculine body. It also calls into question English men’s homosocial relationships with other men who are capable of this. We can therefore see the high stakes — or should we say, steaks — of this conceptualization of meat-fuelled British masculinity, both for national identity and socialization.
Ironically, the disturbance of unsustainable British masculinity bears similarity to how the characterization of Englishmen as voracious meat consumers was impossible to sustain without the importation of foreign produce. If Britain has always relied on the oppression of other nations and identities to produce not only the materials needed to sustain imperial modernity but also its own gender identity, and if this identity ultimately relies on the exploitation of its working classes through the conversion of animal protein into productive industrial labour, then what about British national identity is British exactly? The answer: the reliance on not just the blood of animals, but also of other nations — and of its workers, including women, whose bodies (re)produce the labouring class.
We see, then, the lie of a British masculine identity based on an archaic sense of national pride, born out of patriotic integrity and sustained through a voracious appetite. Instead, what presents itself is a masculine gender identity constructed not on essential protectionism of British property, but one which has more to do with Britain’s ability to access and dominate international resources — from meat to women’s bodies. But the nationalistic valorization of men as both protectors of women and colonial predators of the British empire has ultimately backfired. England finds itself in a crisis, not only of individual masculinity but, by extension of the association between masculine virility and national fortitude, of its heavily gendered national cultural identity. The idea that a skinny vegetarian male, someone who in the eyes of British colonial-industrial expansion isn’t even trying to match up to British masculinity, could be content with themselves, their relationships, and their gender representation, throws up the devastating possibility that perhaps these metrics aren’t what “make the man” after all.
This so-called crisis is therefore also a moment of opportunity. Some men are going their own way, and women are too. Just like female subservience and vulnerability have been used to construct the British masculine protectorate identity, women’s autonomy over their own relationships and dietary preferences has also become the undoing of this heteronormative, nationally reinforced masculinity. By separating exploitative meat consumption from national progress, women and progressive men are pioneering a more fluid future.
Annie Dabb is a student and writer from Newcastle Upon-Tyne, England. She is currently procrastinating finishing her first novel and her second degree by writing about the damaging effects of patriarchy on heteronormative relationships and also quite a lot about tea as a metaphor. Her website can be found here.
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