Beef Tallow

What do elephant tusks, and rhinoceros’ horns have in common?

Both products purported to enhance #male virility are based on symbolism more than reality.

Pride and anxiety reflect and shadow men’s sexuality. In their early years many adolescents are unsure and insecure about sexual performance. Most figure it out and male sexuality naturally peaks in the twenties, matures in the thirties and forties and steadily deteriorates with age. However, the preoccupation with sexuality, potency and prowess persists for the remaining decades.

Seniors Living it up at “the Villages”

The remarkable achievements of modern medicine and the decline in smoking, have extended male longevity in North America well into the eighth decade. Together with the baby boomer bulge, these factors have produced an enormous market for male performance enhancing medication that “puts the prow back in male prowess”. It is estimated that the global market for male medication amounts to three billion dollars per year.

Viagra was the original breakthrough medication. There are now several alternatives to the original purple pill which was clinically proven to deal with the limp term “erectile dysfunction”. While promoted for use in cooking, #beef tallow often trades on the connotation of heightened male sexuality much as the energy drink Red Bull markets itself based the image of a heaving bull on its label.

Presently, US secretary for Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy has promoted the use and consumption of beef tallow along with his other questionable antivaccination and antifluoridation beliefs.

Images of tusks and horns have lurked on the fringes of conventional health well before the era of modern medicine and is something that women find particularly ridiculous about men. The emphasis on horniness has also been pervasive in Eastern cultures. For reasons that seem almost cartoonish, the premiums paid for rhinoceros and male elephant horns was so high that it almost led to the extinction of these species. The extensive marketing of Dodge RAM trucks taps into this same symbolism.

What accounts for the persistent appeal of these traditional symbols of manliness? Some might argue that the power in human imagination comes as “archetypes” first described by Emmanuel Kant. Kant argued that the human brain is imprinted with certain concepts and images on which we later pin our own experience.

Kant would argue that we have a special place in our minds for horns and tusks that gives them great emotional power. Products that find these landing sites benefit from their aura of potency - a critical element in male sexuality and performance.

While it might make visual sense, elephant and rhinoceros tusks are the same but have far less symbolic appeal than the animal hoofs which are comprised of the same material. However, it’s worth exploring for the nugget of truth at the centre of the current popularity of tallow.

Tallow is comprised of 100% fat which is rendered from beef fat. You can make your own by letting the filtered drippings from cooked beef congeal at room temperature. The resulting material is about ½ saturated and unsaturated fat with a small amount of vitamin A, D, E, K and B12. Beef tallow is valued in cooking for its high melting point which gives meat the brown sizzle and crust that makes steak so appealing. Never mind that the high cooking point involved in BBQ or deep frying destroys most of these vitamins and the saturated animal fat promotes heart disease in many folks.

The sizzling steak serves as a satisfying counterpoint to the decades long public health campaign against consumption of dietary animal fat. Standing at a Bar B Q sizzling a fat steak on a smoking grill is one of the last remaining symbols of maleness and a great way to “stick it” to all those thin pale nutritional experts who have railed against red meat for decades.

Beef tallow has also been touted as an #all-natural skin care product. Not surprisingly, there are those who contend that moisturizing the skin with beef tallow is more masculine than using “Oil of Olay”. This belies the fact that there are only a few basic ingredients in making skin care products, water soluble lotions, glycerin-based soaps, hydrophilic lotions such as Aquaphor and oils, ranging from palm and olive oil to Vaseline and tallow.

While the application of vitamins to skin is widely promoted, uninjured skin serves as a barrier that is impervious to applications of topical vitamins and food nutrients (chocolate, cocoa beer and egg to name a few).

There is also concern that the high levels of saturated fat in tallow can worsen certain skin conditions such as acne by blocking pores, increasing inflammation and interfering with the drying which is part of many acne remedies.

In summary, despite its apparent appeal, apart from its role in preparing steak, there is more bull than substance in the claims for beef tallow. As it is in some sense the essence of bull, tallow might be the perfect spirit animal of RFK and his “Elk”- sorry ilk.

Q-Anon Shaman