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Food items like milk, rice, or soy take on various meanings and compositions in different

historical and cultural contexts and become cultural, social, and political symbols situated in

intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, and species (Gaard 596; Adams, ‘Feminized Protein’;

Gurel 67).6

The confluence of institutionalized racism, sexism, and colonialism in the late 19th

century led to widespread sentiments connecting animal-eating (ie, meat and dairy) to

intellectual superiority and virile masculinity exemplified by the white western man (DuPuis,

‘Angels and Vegetables’). Plant-eating, on the other hand, was associated with Asian and other

non-white cultures, and was thought to represent emasculation and to confer weakness of both

mind and body. As E. Melanie DuPuis noted in Angels and Vegetables: A Brief History of Food Advice

in America, ‘the racial rhetoric of the day … portrayed Asians as effeminate and enfeebled and

the Chinese ‘leaf diet’ as a cause of degeneracy’ (41).

Colonial tropes of effeminized ‘plant food masculinity’ were widespread and

mainstream. In 1884, a twenty-nine-year-old American neurologist named James Leonard

Corning published Brain Exhaustion, With Some Preliminary Considerations on Cerebral Dynamics, in

which he sought to explore the numerous ‘demands upon the thinking apparatus’ as well as

possible remedies for a range of ‘mental phenomena’ (5, 195). Corning spoke in one chapter of

‘defective brain nutrition’ and the role between various types of food on the brain’s

development, health, and disease (195-205). In a passage bolstered by his credibility and

authority as an esteemed medical doctor, Corning echoed and reinforced an established colonial

stereotype linking the perceived intellectual inferiority of people living in colonized countries to

the (supposed) plant-based nature of their diets:

Where mental courage, tenacity of purpose, and concentrated energy are required the

introduction of large quantities of fibrin and albumen into the system produces the most

marvelous results. Thus, flesh-eating nations have ever been more aggressive than those

peoples whose diet is largely or exclusively vegetable. The effeminate rice-eaters o

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India and China have again and again yielded to the superior moral courage of an

infinitely smaller number of meat-eating Englishmen. (196; emphasis added)

Not only were colonized people intellectually weak because they ate plants, argued Corning,

but colonizers were intellectually superior because they ate animals, noting that the ‘most

wonderful instance of the intellectual vigor of flesh-eating man is the unbroken triumph of the

Anglo-Saxon race’ (197).7

Corning’s medical opinions were shared by many of his peers: a year before he

published Brain Exhaustion, a respected Australian doctor named Stephen Mannington Caffyn

published How, When, and What to Eat: A Guide to Colonial Diet, in which he cautioned that ‘[w]e

might expect to find rice-eaters everywhere a wretched, impotent, and effeminate race, and

such is the case’ (11).

The fact that Corning, Caffyn, and others linked notions of race to a particular kind of

weakness characterized by effeminacy is significant, as it perpetuated long-standing sexist tropes

connecting femininity and weakness and wove them together with racist tropes and rhetoric

around idealized forms of masculinity. This tactic of connecting weakness to both femininecoded and non-white-coded people was not uncommon at the time: in 1852 an editorial in the

New York Herald asked:

How did woman first become subject to man as she now is all over the world? By her

nature, her sex, just as the negro, is and always will be, to the end of time, inferior to

the white race, and therefore, doomed to subjection; but happier than she would be in

any other condition, just because it is the law of her nature. The women themselves

would not have this law reversed… (cited in Kraditor 190)

The notion that women were weaker than men permeated western culture, and was

echoed even in the halls of the United States Congress; a legislator commenting during a debate

in 1866:

It seems to me as if the God of our race has stamped upon [the women of America] a

milder, gentler nature, which not only makes them shrink from, but disqualifies them

for the turmoil and battle of public life. (Flexner)

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That medical experts like Corning and Caffyn perpetuated these racist and sexist tropes and

grounded them in ‘science’ gave significant legitimacy to these sentiments, leading to what

Carol Adams describes as a ‘racialized politics of meat’ that worked to split the ‘world into

intellectually superior meat eaters and inferior plant eaters’ (The Sexual Politics of Meat, 54). As

Vasile Stănescu explained in The Whopper Virgins: Hamburgers, Gender, and Xenophobia in Burger

King’s Hamburger Advertising, the trope of the ‘effeminate rice eater’ was ‘a concept that

reiterated the biases of colonialism and sexism under a supposedly non-racist and non-colonialist

worldview based on the mutable characteristic of diet instead of an immutable genetics’

(Stănescu 95, citing Corning). Notably, western nutritionists’ assessment of the Asian diet

during this time was ‘downright incorrect’ (DuPuis, ‘Angels and Vegetables’ 40-41).

Anti-Asian sentiments were widespread among everyday working class people as well,

many of whom turned their hostilities not towards people thousands of miles away, but toward

non-white immigrants who lived alongside them, competing for the same jobs. DuPuis explains

how working class US-Americans at the turn of the 20th century pushed back against prominent

nutritionists who argued that ‘[t]he fact that workers in some nations got by on fewer calories

was not a sign of malnourishment; rather, it meant that American workers ate too much’

(‘Angels and Vegetables’ 39). According to DuPuis, ‘[t]he working class responded [to such

nutritional arguments] by defending its right to eat meat, as a privilege of white citizenship’

(‘Angels and Vegetables’ 39).

At the heart of ‘the overlap between racial nativism and working-class demands’ was the

white working class’ animus toward Chinese immigrants, with the ‘newly organized and newly

vocal [white] working class [regarding] Chinese immigration as an attack on their meat-centered

diet’ (‘Angels and Vegetables’ 40). A 1902 report published by the American Federation of

Labor (AFL) supporting the Chinese Exclusion Act ‘expressed the union’s views on Chinese

immigration in terms of ingestion’, titling it ‘Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood vs. Asiatic

Coolieism, Which will Survive?’ (DuPuis, ‘Angels and Vegetables’ 40; Gompers and Gustadt).

During and immediately after World War I, US animus toward Asian people took on a

renewed significance, as the ‘need for strong and aggressive bodies to fulfill national imperial