CHICAGO (AP) — Jelle den Burger and Nirusa Naguleswaran, who were vacationing in Chicago from Europe this week, grabbed a bite at the Dog House Grill: a classic Italian meat sandwich for one, grilled cheese for her.
They both think that the order of their gender in their food choices is not a coincidence. Naguleswaran said women are more likely to give up meat and care about how their diet affects the environment and other people.
“I don’t want to misrepresent that men feel attacked,” Naguleswaran, from the Netherlands, said with a laugh. He said that he used to love eating meat, but it was more important for him to give up meat due to the climate. “It’s in our nature to care about others.”
Now scientists can say with more confidence than ever that gender and meat-eating preferences are linked. A paper published this week in Nature Scientific Reports shows that the difference is almost universal across cultures and is even more pronounced in more developed countries.
Researchers already knew that in some countries, men eat more meat than women. And they knew that people in richer countries ate more meat in general. But recent findings show that when men and women have the social and financial freedom to make choices about their diet, they become further apart, with men eating more meat and women eating less.
This is important because, according to previous research from the University of Illinois, approximately 20% of global planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions come from animal-based food products. The researchers behind the new report think their findings could fine-tune efforts to persuade people to eat less meat and dairy.
“Anything that can be done to reduce meat consumption in men will, on average, have a greater impact than in women,” said Christopher Hopwood, a professor of psychology at the University of Zurich and one of the paper’s authors. The study was based on surveys funded by Mercy for Animals, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending animal agriculture. Hopwood said he is not affiliated with the organization and is not an advocate.
Researchers asked more than 28,000 people in 23 countries on four continents how much of various types of food they ate each day and then calculated average land animal consumption by gender identity in each country. They used the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures health, education and standard of living, to rank how “developed” each country is, and they also looked at the Global Gender Equality Index, a gender equality measure published by the World Economic Forum. .
They found that, with three exceptions (China, India, and Indonesia), gender differences in meat consumption were higher in countries with high development and gender equality scores.
The sheer number and cultural diversity of people surveyed is “the real strength of this,” said Daniel Rosenfeld, a social psychologist at UCLA who studies eating behavior and moral psychology and was not involved in the research.
The research didn’t answer the question of why men tend to eat more meat, but scientists have some theories. The first is that, evolutionarily, women may have been programmed to avoid meat that is hormonally contaminated and could affect pregnancy, whereas men may have sought out meat proteins, given their history as hunters in some societies.
But even the idea of men as hunters is embedded in the culture, Rosenfeld said. This is a good example of another theory, which suggests that social norms shape gender identity from an early age, and therefore how people decide to fill their plates.
Rosenfeld, who said he stopped eating meat about 10 years ago, said his experience hanging out in college “as a guy hanging out with other male friends” showed the cultural pressure for men to eat meat. “If they all eat meat and I decide not to, it could disrupt the natural flow of social situations.”
The same cultural factors that shape gender also influence how people respond to new information, said Carolyn Semmler, a psychology professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia who studies social factors such as meat eating and gender. Semmler was not included in this study. In some of her past work, She has studied cognitive dissonance related to meat eating.
In these cases, she said, women who were presented with information about poor animal welfare in the livestock industry were more likely to say they would reduce their meat consumption. But men tend to go the other way, he said.
“One participant said to me, ‘I think you’re trying to convince me to eat less meat, so I’ll eat more,'” she said.
Semmler said that meat can be important for masculine identity, drawing attention to the concept of men on the grill, for example. Presenting it as a moral reason to eat less meat can be a sensitive issue, he said. Still, he said people need to be aware of how their food choices affect the planet.
But he and Hopwood acknowledged how difficult it is to change behavior.
“Men are a tough nut to crack,” Hopwood said.
Jose Lopez, another restaurant owner at Dog House Grill, said he thinks men should eat less meat, but generally observes the opposite.
“We are carnivores. “Men eat like savages,” he said.
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