Tell me what your type is, I'll tell you what you eat

“Beef. “It’s what’s for dinner” Robert Mitchum, with a rough voice, urged America in the iconic campaign launched by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association in the early 1990s: beef for dinner. A subliminal father figure, the actor perfectly embodied a stoic masculinity inherited from Westerns and film noir. Without ever showing it head-on, the commercial implicitly brought the American nuclear family into existence and placed red meat at the center of this social architecture.

A reminder of the dominant heterosexual, white, and hierarchical cultural order, this implicit narrative makes meat a tool of power not because it nourishes, but because it symbolically structures social and gendered assignments. From this perspective, eating meat amounts to performing a hegemonic masculine identity, opposed to sensitivity, moderation, or ecological awareness. This "virile capital," always on the edge, requires constant reconstruction, especially where masculinity is scrutinized or put to the test (working-class environments, sports arenas, etc.).

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