In the Texas race for U.S. Senate, Republicans keep coming back to the same insult: that James Talarico, the Democratic candidate, does not eat meat. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has referred to his opponent as “Tofu Talarico.” Donald Trump has repeatedly called Talarico a vegan—sometimes pronouncing it “vay-gan,” and sometimes embellishing it with the assertion that Talarico does eat meat, but that afterward, he “throws up all over the place.” At one October rally, the president said of Talarico, “In Texas he talks about, I’m a vegan, I’m a vegan,” and then helpfully explained, “vegan meaning he likes lettuce.”

For the record, Talarico is not a vegan. He has denied being one repeatedly, and as a visual rebuttal, his campaign posted a picture of him chomping on a turkey leg. His critics may be basing their attacks on some statements Talarico made during his 2022 campaign for reelection to the Texas House of Representatives. In one speech, he said that reducing meat consumption is the “moral thing to do,” and that his campaign had become a “nonmeat campaign” that was buying only “vegan products from our local vegan businesses.” But he has said his current campaign “basically runs on barbecue,” and unless he means tempeh burgers, this means it is not vegan. Nevertheless, Senator Ted Cruz played a clip of the 2022 speech on a recent podcast episode and cited it as evidence that Talarico wants to “destroy oil and gas and destroy cattle ranching.” The conservative commentator Sean Hannity said on his podcast last month that Talarico is running a “vegan campaign.”

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The plant-based criticisms seem to be less about Talarico’s diet and more an attempt to undermine his masculinity. Manliness is still a trait that many American voters look for in their male leaders, and a beefy corpus of psychological literature reveals that people subconsciously associate meat-eating with masculinity. And although this bias exists almost everywhere, it’s particularly prevalent in Texas, the nation’s biggest cattle-producing state, where brisket is such a way of life that Texas Monthly magazine has a “barbecue editor.”

Studies conducted across more than a dozen countries, and with excellent titles such as “Eating Meat Makes You Sexy,” have found that people consider meat eaters to be more masculine than vegetarians, and especially more so than vegans. These studies have concluded that eating meat makes men “feel like real men”; that women prefer omnivorous men and rate them as more attractive; and that men who want to be seen as more masculine are less likely to consider giving up meat. “There is a metaphoric relationship between mammal muscle meat and maleness” is how one such study vividly put it. In the United States, women are more likely to be vegetarian or vegan than men are. Even female vegans think male vegans are more feminine than meat-eating men, which shows how “deeply rooted in our consciousness” these stereotypes are, Dominika Adamczyk, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences who has conducted several studies on meat-eating and perceptions of masculinity in Poland, told me.

Veganism might seem female-coded because it connotes empathy and a concern about animal welfare, which may be positive qualities in general but are not exactly Texas tough. Vegan men seem to violate the stereotype that men should be strong, ruthless killers. The accusations that Talarico is a vegan invoke “this idea that compassion, particularly with animals, is kind of incompatible with masculinity,” Rob Velzeboer, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia who has co-authored a review of the meat-masculinity studies, told me. Veganism seems more socially acceptable when men pursue it for health reasons rather than animal-welfare reasons, Velzeboer added.

Politicians seem to be well aware of what their diet implies about their manliness. Men running for office from both parties have long made sure to ostentatiously eat meat on camera. George H. W. Bush liked to order a rare T-bone steak while campaigning. In 2003, John Kerry chowed on a cheesesteak in Philly (though, controversially, with Swiss cheese rather than Cheez Whiz) a few weeks before he announced he was running for president. And practically all Oval Office hopefuls stop by the Iowa State Fair to gnaw on a pork chop. Meanwhile, the mere suggestion of salad can lead to an entire news cycle: After Barack Obama remarked on the high price of arugula in 2007, during his campaign for president, a spokesperson for his Republican rival John McCain derided him as an “arugula-eating, pointy-headed-professor type.”

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Like Obama before him, Talarico may overcome this attack. But the stereotype that a good, strong leader eats meat will likely stick around. On some lizard-brain level, many people appreciate a man who seems like he can slay a bison and drag its carcass back to the cave for dinner. Reading the psychological literature, I was shocked by just how many people around the world have an innate association between animal protein and machismo.

But perhaps I shouldn’t have been: Many years ago, I visited Russia, my birthplace and another culture that insists on manly meat-eating. One day my husband, Rich, and I sat down with my Russian cousin at a mostly vegetarian St. Petersburg restaurant for lunch. Scanning the menu, my cousin grew more and more uneasy. “I don’t know if this place will have the right food for Richard,” she said. “A man must eat meat.”

Toddler parenting is an exercise in picking battles, and one I almost never pick is the battle over sugar. Quite often, my 2-and-a-half-year-old eats just a few bites of his meal before proclaiming himself “done, done, done,” yet mysteriously also desirous of dessert. Generally, at this point, I’ll give him a cookie, or whatever sweet he’s fixated on—yes, even if he hasn’t finished his healthy dinner, or if it’s almost bedtime, or if we’re somewhere I need him to behave.

I feel good about these choices because: science. For one thing, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations on added sugar are generous, allowing for more than an entire Klondike bar’s worth of it a day. For another, sugar doesn’t make kids hyper. The sooner parents internalize this, the sooner they can drop sugar policing from the dreaded mental load and reapportion that slot to some other parental drudgery, such as keeping track of spirit days.

Wherever a child is tipping over a bin of Legos or jumping on a couch, a “sugar rush” is bound to be blamed. Popular shows including The Office and Abbott Elementary have episodes in which characters eat too much sugar, go into overdrive, and crash. I’m often warned by other moms not to give my son anything sweet—by which I guess they mean any and all toddler food—before naptime.

Their admonitions, however, are misguided. “I know parents, and many people would love to be able to point the finger at sugar” when a child acts up, Jill Castle, a pediatric dietitian, told me. “But it just doesn’t hold up in the research.” A series of studies from the 1980s and ’90s, led by a prominent pediatrician named Mark Wolraich, helped break the connection between sugar and hyperactivity, which is generally defined as restlessness, poor behavior, and impulsivity.

In 1985, Wolraich and his colleagues studied 16 hyperactive boys who were fed a clinically monitored, sugar-free diet for a day, then given either a sugary or an artificially sweetened drink. The researchers found no difference in behavior or cognition between the boys who consumed the sugary drink and those who had the sugar-free one. In a 1994 double-blind, controlled trial, Wolraich found that when kids ate a high-sugar diet for three weeks, they performed no differently on a series of behavioral and cognitive measures than when they ate little sugar. In a 1995 meta-analysis, he examined the results of 23 studies and concluded that “sugar does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children.”

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For some children, sugar can have a slight sedative effect, and regularly consuming way too much can eventually put kids at risk for type 2 diabetes and obesity. The AAP recommends that kids ages 2 to 18 have no more than 25 grams of added sugar a day, the equivalent of about three fun-sized packages of M&Ms. (The guidance doesn’t apply to naturally occurring sugar, including the kind in fruit.) On special occasions such as Halloween, exceeding this limit is fine, Gwen Cook, a pediatrician at the University of Utah Hospital, told me. Many pediatricians discourage trying to eliminate sugar from a child’s diet entirely, Cook said, because doing so is “unnecessarily restrictive, especially socially.” No one wants to be the kid at a birthday party eating carrot sticks instead of cake.

Despite these findings, the sugar-hyperactivity myth has survived for decades because sugary foods tend to be served during celebrations that are otherwise chaotic and overstimulating, such as Halloween, Christmas, and birthdays. Some kids become wired at these festivities because the environment is novel and exciting, not because they’re eating chocolate. “They’re playing games; there’s music or decorations up that are different,” Cook said. “All of those things can feed into a child being more hyperactive.”

Parents may also expect kids to become hyper when they have sweets: In one study, mothers who were told that their kids had consumed a large dose of sugar rated their children as significantly more hyperactive than mothers who were told that their kids had received an artificially sweetened placebo—even though all of the kids had actually ingested the placebo. (This expectancy effect was stronger, the study authors said, for “cognitively rigid mothers.”) When kids eat sugar, parents may be more likely to interpret their behavior as wild, and attribute it to the sugar. So the myth lives on.

I also think parents persist in believing that sugar makes kids rambunctious for the same reason they believe in so many other dubious child-rearing fallacies. Parents long for an explanation for their kids’ inexplicable behavior and for a sense of control over it. If sugar really explained why kids became manic and naughty, parents could create peace by banning Skittles and soda. But sugar isn’t to blame, which leaves us to accept our kids for the frenzied, irrational beings that they are.

One day not long ago, Franky, a 40-something woman who lives in the mid-Atlantic region, got an infuriating text message from her aunt. It was just the latest truth-stretching missive she had sent, and Franky’s impulse was to write back: “You’re a liar. You’ve always been a liar. All you do is lie.” Instead, she asked an AI program to write a response that was less “condescending and unnecessarily emotional.” AI-ese, Franky told me, helps make her responses more logical and neutral. Another message that she sent her aunt after running it through a chatbot read, “I respect you and I expect the same in return. I want to have a mature conversation.” The aunt appreciated it, Franky said—she called her and sounded calm.

Franky is among a number of people—we’ll never truly know how many, will we?—who secretly use AI programs such as ChatGPT and Claude when they interact with difficult family members. I interviewed several of them. Mostly, my interviewees use AI to communicate with individuals they don’t want an emotionally close relationship with—an ex they co-parent with, for example, or an in-law—but whom they nevertheless can’t escape. (Because they are describing tense personal relations, most of my interviewees requested not to be identified by their full name.)

People use AI to both interpret messages they receive and help them write their own to send. If they have to, say, call out rude behavior or express disagreement about whether the kids need a certain type of therapy, they type what they really want to say into one of these programs, ask the AI to nice it up a little, and paste the resulting verbiage into their text messages. Outsourcing correspondence to AI has enabled them to maintain harmony without spending too much time thinking about how to draft a perfect response. As Franky put it, using AI lets her have a relationship without allowing it to “live rent-free in my brain.” Franky said that in her family, it’s important for people “all to have, I don’t know, peace.” She and others have found that they can improve their relationships and at least increase the probability of peace by removing emotion from conversations. And that’s where AI truly excels.

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Another woman I spoke with told me about how Claude had helped her revise a text to a family member who often misinterprets her words. This person, she said, sent her a message implying that he wanted her out of his life. Her impulse was to reply, “Congratulations. You got your wish,” but Claude softened that statement because it could “read as sarcasm/implication.” Then it asked, “Want it warmer, blunter, or shorter still?” Claude, she added, “leaves out the emotional part” and makes it more likely that the recipient will hear her and work toward a resolution.

People reach for Cyrano de Anthropic because during difficult text-based conversations, “it’s hard to know what to say,” Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist and the author, most recently, of The Balancing Act, told me. When we’re interacting in person, mechanisms in the brain help us interpret people’s body language and facial expressions, Matthew Fishleder, a therapist in Maryland, told me. But text and email strip messages of that context. “We’re left trying to decipher, What does this text from my mom mean?” he said. “And how in the world do I respond to something like this?”

In tense situations, people generally know what they’d like to express, Tawwab said, but then they might think, “I can’t say that.” AI can phrase the message in a slightly gentler way—and it can offer the sender “less of a responsibility” for how the recipient reacts. If your mom gets mad about your AI-assisted message, you can always mentally blame Dario Amodei.

The most common use case I encountered for deploying AI in this way was to correspond calmly with an ex-spouse, whom one may now resent with the fire of a thousand billable lawyer hours but whom one must treat cordially, lest one gets threatened with changes to the custody agreement. (As one Florida woman who uses AI for this purpose told me, sending an “F you” text to your ex might feel amazing, but you have to think about the “legal ramifications.”) A father in Arizona told ChatGPT to use a “five-star-hotel-clerk tone” with his ex, and it did—to the point that, reading over his shoulder, his child was shocked by how nice their parents were being to each other. A woman who asked to go by the initial S. told me that she uses AI to negotiate co-parenting decisions with her ex-partner. When AI helps her write “in a very neutral tone so that it’s not inflaming,” she said, “we help our kids to the best degree possible.” She told me that the tool has improved her relationship with her ex-partner, and that she even sometimes recommends the same strategy to her clients in her work as a therapist.

If their exes figure out that they’re using AI, many of the people I spoke with don’t really care. S. thinks her ex may be using it too, because sometimes she’ll notice that “that’s a tone I don’t hear very often from him,” she said. The Florida woman said that her ex has accused her of using AI “many times” but that she’s not especially concerned about impressing him. “It’s like, Oh, I know. I’m terrible in every way, including that I use AI,” she said. “Add it to the list. We get it.’”

The people I spoke with had a range of other reasons for using AI. Several of my interviewees are not native English speakers, and they feel that they are frequently misunderstood when they use their own words. “Even when I do try my absolute best, it just doesn’t work,” the Arizona father told me. One of the people he has used AI to communicate with is an abusive parent; given his childhood environment, he said, he doesn’t have much experience being spoken to amiably and calmly.

Others don’t have much experience with writing, period: A woman named Ashleigh told me that she uses ChatGPT to communicate with her baby’s father’s family because she’s “not a writer at all.” She said that she types in what she wants to say, then prompts the system to “take some of the emotion out and put more of the facts in it.” “It’s great for hard conversations,” she added, “that you know you’re gonna blow up on.” Finally, many of my interviewees like how much time AI saves them. They don’t want to spend their one wild and precious life drafting heartfelt texts to their weird cousin; they want to outsource all of that to Claude. As Franky put it to me, in one of the most relatable quotes I have ever gathered, “I just don’t have time in general to do anything.”

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Using a robot to talk with humans has downsides, of course, even if only philosophical ones. Relying on AI for communication can mean that we are “outsourcing our inner power to a machine,” Tawwab said. The people I spoke with are well aware of that. Even though she uses it herself, S. said that her therapy clients can become overly dependent on AI, to the point where they “aren’t thinking for themselves as much.” But as far as mortal sins go, this practice seems to fall somewhere around ordering from Amazon Prime or eating at McDonald’s—you may have misgivings, but the convenience truly can’t be beat.

Fishleder, the Maryland therapist, said that although AI can be helpful in a pinch, it won’t resolve the larger relationship dynamics at issue—and it’s further evidence of what he characterized as the “movement away from relying on one another as humans.” Still, when I asked him whether he also sometimes uses AI to write tricky messages, he said, “100 percent.” Sometimes you just need to send a firm but polite text about Thanksgiving plans. It’s not cheating; it’s muddling through.