Walz, Meat and Masculinity, Maybe Not-So-Redefined

This story was originally published by Sentient Media.

In Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, many people see a new, refreshing form of masculinity — one premised not on competition, domination and hierarchy, but on compassion, collaboration and kindness. But although Walz is indeed challenging traditional gender norms, there’s one classically “masculine” value that he proudly hasn’t let go of. And this exception is worth digging into: hunting and eating meat.

Walz as a representative of ‘tonic’ masculinity’

In recent years, much conversation around masculinity has focused on what’s referred to as “toxic masculinity.” This refers to a subset of beliefs, behaviors and value sets that have traditionally been associated with “manliness,” yet are in fact destructive to men, women and society on the whole.

Toxic masculinity manifests in countless ways, but it’s most commonly associated with misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. Many have also drawn a link between toxic masculinity and racism as well, though the former doesn’t explicitly entail the latter.

Despite all of this, it’s crucial to note that there are plenty of other traits that have commonly been associated with masculinity that aren’t harmful. These include positive attributes such as leadership, strength and courage, according to Princeton University, as well as pop culture interests like sports and history.

Many observers argue that Walz retains many of these positive and neutral aspects of masculinity while rejecting the toxic ones. This hybrid approach has been referred to by some as “tonic masculinity” — a productive, healthy alternative to toxic masculinity — and in recent weeks, Walz has become its poster child.

For instance, Walz was a high school football coach before he entered politics, and he was the first faculty adviser for his school’s gay-straight alliance club. Traditional masculinity often includes a degree of homophobia, and yet you would be hard-pressed to find a more traditionally masculine job than a football coach.

By using his position as coach to promote LGBTQ equality, Walz leveraged his status as a masculine-coded man to help combat one of the more odious elements of toxic masculinity. That’s tonic masculinity in a nutshell.

There are plenty of other examples. Walz says that people who don’t support abortion rights should “mind [their] own damn business,” utilizing the masculine value of tough-talk (and mild profanity) to promote freedom of choice. Even simply by accepting the offer to be Kamala Harris’s running mate, Walz has agreed to play second banana to a powerful woman — something that toxic masculinity, with its focus on anti-femininity, would forbid out-of-hand.

The cumulative impact of this shouldn’t be understated, as Walz is effectively modeling a new, more healthy version of masculinity to America’s youth. That’s a great thing.

But it would be a mistake to suggest that Walz has jettisoned all of the toxic elements of masculinity. One aspect of traditional masculinity that he has certainly held on to is the value placed on hunting animals and eating meat.

Walz, the enthusiastic meat-eater and hunter

Shortly after being tapped as Harris’s running mate, Walz released a video of him and his daughter Hope at the Minnesota state fair.

“We’re gonna go get some food,” Walz says midway through the video before turning to address Hope. “Corn dog?”

“I’m a vegetarian,” Hope replies.

“Turkey, then,” Walz retorts.

“Turkey’s meat,” Hope reminds her dad.

“Not in Minnesota,” Walz jokes. “Turkey’s special.”

Democrats are often depicted as out-of-touch elitists, but Walz’s folksy aesthetic, midwestern roots and rural bona fides make him somewhat immune to this accusation. That’s a big part of his electoral appeal, and his ability to embody tonic masculinity.

But Walz’s everyman qualities are a package deal, and part of that package still appears to be a reaffirmation of hunting and meat-eating as core components of masculinity and relatability.

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“I’m a hunter,” Walz said in his nominating speech at the Democratic National Committee last month. “I was a better shot than most Republicans in Congress and I have the trophies to prove it.”

As a congressman, Walz was a participant in the annual Congressional Shootout of clay pigeons, and according to one former colleague, the Democratic team “beat the Republicans three or four years in a row” after Walz joined. As governor, Walz presides over the state’s annual deer and fishing season openers, annual celebrations of the beginning of deer hunting and fishing seasons.

Walz’s record on meat, agriculture and sustainability

Though Walz has made clear that he’s a hunter who enjoys meat, his policies as an elected official matter much more than what he does in his personal life. And on matters of agriculture and sustainability, Walz has mostly — though not entirely — pursued sustainable, pro-environment policies.

On the one hand, he has supported or implemented a number of energy policies that earned him high marks from environmental groups. As a congressman, he also introduced the Strengthening Our Investment in Land (SOIL) Stewardship Act, which included several important soil conservation policies and was ultimately passed via the 2018 Farm Bill.

Both in Congress and as governor, Walz has fought against consolidation in the meat and agricultural industries on a number of occasions. This is when smaller businesses merge or are acquired en masse, resulting in fewer companies and more power in the hands of the largest producers. The largest factory farms often are linked with environmental problems, like air and water pollution, because of the sheer number of animals packed into one operation.

However, Walz is a big supporter of the ethanol industry. That’s no surprise, as Minnesota is home to a lot of ethanol producers. But it’s a problem for the environment, as a 2022 study found that in all likelihood, corn-based ethanol actually produces more carbon emissions than gasoline. In 2020, Walz joined several Republican governors in demanding that the EPA implement a rule that would require small refineries to use a certain amount of biofuels, such as ethanol, in their operations.

In addition, despite the many sustainable policies he has supported and enacted, Walz does not appear to have acknowledged the enormous role that meat production plays in destroying the environment.

Besides the fact that Walz comes from a state with a large meat and dairy industry, it’s worth taking a step back to look at why else that might be.

A brief history of meat and masculinity in America

Carol J. Adams is the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, a seminal text examining the gendered and sexual undertones of meat-eating. In her book, Adams explores the connection between feminist values and animal welfare, and likewise, between male dominance and the consumption of meat.

The association between meat and masculinity goes back hundreds of years, Adams says, and can be traced in part to westward expansion and the introduction of cattle and other mammals to North America.

Although Indigenous people did eat meat prior to the arrival of Europeans, it wasn’t central to their diet. In fact, many of the animals that we now regard as livestock didn’t even exist in pre-colonial North America.

“It was British and Spanish colonists who brought over cows. Cows aren’t native to North America,” Adams tells Sentient. “[As] Native Americans were pushed off their land, pasture land was claimed for cows. This is also when buffaloes were exterminated to create space for cows.”

In addition to cattle, Europeans also introduced pigs, sheep and goats to the New World. As such, colonization caused “a disruption not just in how Indigenous peoples lived in northern North America, but also how the animals lived,” Adams says.

The settlers didn’t just bring ships, animals and diseases to America. They brought their dietary values, too, and meat consumption was one of those values.

As cattle were later dispersed throughout the country en masse in the 19th and early 20th century, the soil was fertile for new national myths and value sets.

“By the mid-19th century, we were ripe for new cultural mythologies,” Adams says. “One of them was the cowboy.”

This and other myths played out not only in North America, but around the world, as Great Britain continued to colonize non-Western countries that, prior to British involvement, didn’t rely heavily on meat. This further increased the association between colonialism, masculinity and meat-eating.

During the latter half of the 20th century, the vegetarian and vegan movements grew in popularity and became increasingly more visible in mainstream culture. This represented a challenge to the centrality of meat — to American diets in general, but also to masculinity in particular.

“By the ‘90s, meat-eating has been at least challenged,” Adams says. “And so what you see is the beginnings of the assertion that ‘of course there’s a connection [between masculinity and meat].’”

Meat-eating as American manhood

All of this was encapsulated perfectly, Adams says, in a controversial 2006 Hummer ad.

The commercial depicted two men in line at the grocery store, one buying tofu and the other buying meat. After sharing an uncomfortable look with the meat-buyer, the tofu-buyer sees an ad for Hummer, and races to a dealership to buy one. The ad ends with him driving off in his new Hummer and smugly biting into a carrot, with the slogan “Restore Your Manhood” appearing on screen.

The message was crystal clear: Eating tofu instead of meat makes you less of a man, but if you buy a big truck, you can get your manhood back. Hummer’s acknowledgement of this anxious masculinity, and its relationship to both cars and meat, was too on-the-nose, and the ad drew heavy criticism from all sides. Ultimately, enough people complained that Hummer was forced to change the text at the end to the incrementally more subtle slogan “Restore The Balance.”

While the Hummer commercial was one of the more pointed examples of pop culture drawing an explicit link between meat-eating and masculinity, it’s by no means the only one. In a 2008 meta-study, researcher Richard Rogers looked at several mid-2000s advertisements that associated carnivorism with manhood.

“These advertisements demonstrate that scholars interested in the status of masculinity must pay attention to the ‘threats’ to masculinity posed by environmental and animal rights movements,” Rogers wrote, “and that scholars interested in environmental movements must pay attention to the role of masculinity in resisting moves toward sustainability.”

Tying it all together

It’s important to look at Walz in context. Plenty of politicians in America proudly display their meat-eating bona fides, and many are avid hunters as well. The overwhelming majority of politicians in both parties don’t talk about the massive environmental impacts of the meat industry. Even environmentalists are often reluctant to target meat production: The Green New Deal, one of the most high-profile and ambitious pieces of climate legislation in American history, doesn’t once mention animal agriculture’s impact on the environment.

What’s much less common are politicians who, like Walz, can say they supported LGBTQ equality all the way back in the 1990s, when almost 70 percent of Americans still thought gay marriage should be illegal. In doing this, he challenged a major tenet of toxic masculinity long before most of his contemporaries. Walz’s actions on soil conservation, electric cars and renewable energy are also unusually progressive compared to most elected officials.

All of this is a long way of saying that Walz is better on climate and sustainability than many of his peers and appears more willing to challenge traditional concepts of masculinity than most. His proud carnivorism is a reminder that deconstructing harmful norms takes time; for all of the progress that’s been made, including by Walz himself, there’s still a lot of work to do.

The bottom line

In Adams’ eyes, the fact that we’re even talking about new forms of masculinity reflects “the fact that masculinity is not a stable force” in the way it once was. Compared to 35 years ago, when “The Sexual Politics of Meat” was published, there’s much more anxiety around masculinity and all of the values it has traditionally encompassed, meat-eating included. And this, Adams says, is a sign of progress.

“You can’t go back to a non-problematized world of consuming animals, and the reproductive products of female animals,” Adams says, “because it’s been disturbed. … Every time somebody’s anxious about it, I see that as a win.”