Some Men, They Fear the Fake Cheese
The politics of vegan pizza and the plant-based aisle at Wegman's
It was an early Autumn afternoon, and Olivia and I were demolishing a late lunch; hot sandwiches (they’re called grinders, right?)—seitan, roasted broccoli rabe, vegan cheese, red pepper flakes—at Screamer’s Pizzeria in Crown Heights. Two men walked into the restaurant, unoccupied save for us, and from what we could tell they’d been searching for a slice of pizza for a hot minute. The one leading their mission inspected the acrylic greenhouse in which the room-temperature pies sat, looking a bit worse for wear (though lacking the same moisture content, fat, and the presence of bacteria that thrive in animal proteins and fats). Screamer’s is a vegan establishment, explaining all the seitan and fake cheese, and why the lead guy had just called out to his companion in reassurance that their search for pizza could potentially end here, hold the cheese.
“Nah… I gotta get outta here,” said the second dude, shaking his head and quickly turning heel as if by no longer facing the counter he might yet avoid irrevocable change to his eating principles (or damage to his masculinity). To provide himself additional reassurance, and to display his aversion to the very idea of vegan pizza, he added, rather loudly and mostly to himself, “I don’t do none of that plant-based shit.”
The conflation of meat and masculinity is certainly not just a byproduct of modern Western society. It just happened to get a particularly strong reinforcement in the last century or so from male-targeted media and advertising—making today's plant-based meat products somewhat of a tougher sell to a population weaned on the heteronormative notion that a "real" man is practically teething on a T-bone, acquiescing to the occasional vegetable only when nagged or guilted by his female partner.
Kat Kinsman for Food & Wine
In her seminal book, The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J Adams offers a feminist-vegetarian critique of how patriarchal structures shape the consumption of animal products by associating them with power, dominance, and masculinity at large. There, she links the refusal to consume animal products with perceptions of weakness or loss of masculinity, a fear of feminization felt by some men in the West who often view participating in vegetarianism/veganism as a loss of manhood.
Here, in Crown Heights, we’re witnessing this effect in real-time. I almost wanted to call out to him and ask him why. Would he be clowned by his friends for eating fake pepperoni? Would being caught dead in a vegan pizzeria mean the death of his masculinity? Maybe he just doesn’t like vegan cheese (same, I get it. I prefer regular pizza with real cheese.) and that’s fine. But his reaction, visceral in its urgency, stuck with me. To some men, shame or embarrassment is inherent in almost any activity that deviates from normative masculinity, often inflicted by one’s peers.
I’m assuming that the rejection of vegan pizza we witnessed at Screamer’s wasn’t just about taste; it was about the perception that a bite of a pizza made without animal products could destabilize an identity, belonging within a social circle, and an entire way of living. Adams writes: “Men may feel the need to shame others—or themselves—into conformity, avoiding plant-based foods because they signify a departure from the patriarchal norms that frame meat-eating as an essential component of manhood.” Just as meat and animal products are associated with male dominance, plant-based foods, and vegetables are associated with femininity or softness. The latter might be seen as an affront to those conventional ideals of masculinity—“I don’t do none of that plant-based shit” is a thorough rejection of that softness.
“The sexual politics of meat assumes men need to eat meat in order to be masculine and virile,” Adams explained in a 2016 Vice interview. “Yet it’s become evident that people can be entirely healthy and happy without eating meat or animal products. So now we have a dominant cultural drive to embarrass, shame, and harass men who divert from these politics by embracing veganism.”
It should come as little surprise that masculinity, a terminally troublesome affair, would stand in the way of adopting a diet more suitable for our bodies and our world. Only 5% of American adults (that’s around 9.7 million people) follow a vegetarian/plant-based diet, whether for necessity, health, environmental consciousness, or animal welfare. Men are underrepresented among vegans and vegetarians—nearly 60 percent are female and just around 40 percent are male. I need not wax that eating more plants is better for one’s health and this burning planet—that much has been studied.
“C’mon man…” his companion shook his head as their quest for pizza seemed to fizzle out, walking out of the slice shop, one after the other. No statistics would be shaken up today.
This particular day was an errand-heavy one for Olivia and me, and the lunch stop at Screamer’s gave us the mental and physical fortitude to brave the Sunday shopping surge. At Wegman’s, Rochester’s gift to the world, we were herded through the store’s interior like livestock by the omnipresent PhDs whose invisible shepherding, the layout and design of the modern grocery store, ensures that your eyes scan the right products and your body moves through the store in a way that derives the highest value. You’re there for essentials. You’re also there to circumvent your grocery list and add an extra on-sale, out-of-season blueberry carton to your cart.
We’ve, as usual, ended up at the refrigerated case which houses the tempeh and other plant-based proteins, our eyes strafing the display for any novel packaging—it sometimes feels like we’ve tried most of the available market. We typically stay away from overtly fake meat and fake cheese, opting instead for tempeh, seitan, and tofu*, straight up.
A dude in a Yankees cap slowly sauntered up behind us - I could feel him staring over our shoulders as he narrated his shopping list: “We already got bread. Meat, is this the meat? Oh nah, this is all vegan shit,” he said to his partner (in life or in shopping, I couldn’t tell) who trailed along behind him. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he directed, rolling his cart elsewhere. I couldn’t help but feel bad for the soft tofu - didn’t he know that, unlike its extra firm cousins, it might take that kind of rejection to heart?
Slow your roll, big dawg. I understand personal and family preference might necessitate you skipping over the Soyboy tofu (local to Rochester, same as Wegman’s, and in operation since before the pejorative) this time, but did you really have to get (the hell) out of here so quick? There are many interesting ways you can skin a block of beancurd (and I’m not talking Yuba). You could fire up the grill, and cook down a sticky soy-brown sugar-rice vinegar sauce to pour over top the brick once it’s been charred to your liking. You could, instead, brine the tofu in pickle juice, hot sauce, mustard, and gochugaru, dredge in seasoned batter, and deep fry to make Superiority Burger’s “tofu fried tofu” sandwich. You might even forget you’re not eating the flesh of a factory-farmed animal!
As my friend Justin Lee, chef-owner of (the formerly vegan) Fat Choy, told me of his mission when I interviewed him for Made Here: “You didn’t miss eating a steak, you can do this every now and then! If people did this once a month, or once a quarter, what a change! What a change we would see. It’s still less than every day of your life.” Adams echoes this: “When you have the chance to serve people vegan food, do it—but don’t call attention to it. Let someone eat a great vegan meal and not know it’s vegan. Then they learn. This gives them, now and then, consciousness—which gives them a place to judge and make sense of their own dissonance.” Perhaps if those guys hadn’t noticed Screamer’s was a vegan spot, had grabbed some slices, and sated their hunger all the same, they might have completed their quest for pizza (and perhaps even enjoyed the outcome), shifting their perspectives.
Consumer preference and marketing play an outsize role here, naturally. The labels slapped on plant-based packaging stereotype them as generally being a “softer” option on one’s body and the earth. This poses an issue for some men, who might see this and incorrectly extrapolate that by even entertaining a tempeh purchase they might lose a part of their identity (or that the soy would cause breasts to grow, as I was once warned would happen to me by other kids in middle school who saw me drinking soy milk or eating tofu—a myth, of course, largely rooted in the racist belief that Asian men, and their diets, are inherently effeminate).
“Men might be less inclined to consume vegan food due to the need to perform gender,” said Alma Scholz, author of a study on masculinity and social perceptions around vegan food. “However, with vegan food being framed in a masculine way, men might feel less resistance and become more likely to consume it.” This re-branding and sub-branding exercise is well underway, but these short-term interventions or superficial changes in food labeling are insufficient to overcome entrenched stereotypes. A broader cultural shift or more compelling strategies are needed to convince Pizza-less Guy and Yankees Cap Dude to sit in their own discomfort and try something new.
Rejecting plant-based food isn’t just about personal preference or taste; it’s a broader refusal of what plant-based eating represents in our culture. To some, the idea of tofu or seitan threatens the very construct of masculinity that’s been tethered to meat for centuries.
Meat consumption in our society fragments animals into commodified parts—a drumstick, a breast, a rib—a reduction that mirrors how femininity is objectified and consumed, an idea familiar to anyone who has read The Sexual Politics of Meat. Plant-based foods, with their cultural associations with softness, challenge these constructs, creating discomfort and resistance in those for whom masculinity feels like an identity they must constantly defend.
Refusing to eat meat isn’t just about a dietary choice; it’s a refusal to participate in the gendered politics of consumption. If it helps to hear it from me, eating tofu won’t make you a soy boy, unless you want it to. And while some men might balk at vegan pizza or plant-based proteins (I still find it funny both of those happened within an hour of each other), what they’re really defending themselves from is the vulnerability and openness required to question norms they’ve been taught to uphold. In doing so, they miss out—not just on a very okay slice of vegan pizza (again, I prefer the real thing)—but on the chance to reimagine who they might become.
* It bears mentioning that these ancient Buddhist foods were never historically intended as stand-ins for meat. In certain cuisines, say Sichuanese, tofu and meat appear together in dishes, serving as a complement rather than a direct replacement. These protein-rich foods are also “enjoyed for what they are on their own,” writes Cathy Erway in FoodPrint, “just like beans or any other plant-based, protein-rich food (or dairy).” She notes that the trio, now marketed as plant-based meat alternatives in the West, have been enjoyed for centuries in East Asia, “well before the industrial revolution, food science, and tech startup culture made such later inventions as hemoglobin-addled burgers possible.” But fake meats and the marketing machine behind plant-based foods are a topic for another time.
For more in the interim, and to learn how this topic can redefine our relationships with food, may I suggest
’s No Meat Required?For more on gender performance, read my last post.
"Slow your roll, big dawg." 😂