Jelle Den Burger and Nirusa Naguleswaran, vacationing in Chicago this week from Europe, grabbed a bite to eat at the Dog House Grill — a classic Italian beef sandwich for him, and a grilled cheese for his wife. (Read this also | Preventive measures for women to reduce heart disease risk and improve mortality,
Both believe the way people of their gender made their food choices was no coincidence. Naguleswaran said women are more likely to abstain from eating meat, and they care about how their diet affects the environment and other people.
“I don’t want to put it in the wrong way that men feel humiliated,” Naguleswaran, from the Netherlands, said with a laugh. She said she loved eating meat, but giving it up for climate reasons was more important to her. “It’s in our nature to care for 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 this difference is nearly universal across all cultures — and it’s even more pronounced in countries that are more developed.
Researchers already knew that in some countries men eat more meat than women. And they knew that people in rich countries eat more meat overall. But the latest findings show that when men and women have the social and financial freedom to make choices about their diets, they become even more separated from each other, with men eating more meat and women eating less.
This is important because about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planet come from animal-based food products, according to earlier research from the University of Illinois. The researchers behind the new report believe their findings could improve efforts to persuade people to eat less meat and dairy.
“Anything that can be done to reduce meat consumption in men will have a greater effect on average than in women,” said Christopher Hopwood, a psychology professor at the University of Zurich and one of the paper’s authors. The work is based on surveys funded by Mercy for Animals, a nonprofit dedicated to ending animal agriculture. Hopwood said he is not affiliated with the organization and is not a supporter of it.
The researchers asked more than 28,000 people in 23 countries on four continents how many servings of a variety of foods they ate each day, 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 also looked at the Global Gender Gap Index, a measure of gender equality published by the World Economic Forum.
They found that, with three exceptions – China, India and Indonesia – the gender gap in meat consumption was larger in countries with higher levels of development and gender equality.
The large number and cultural diversity of the people included in the survey “is its real strength,” said UCLA social psychologist Daniel Rosenfeld, who studies eating behavior and moral psychology and was not involved in the study.
The study didn’t answer the question of why men eat more meat, but scientists have a few theories. One theory is that evolutionarily, women may have been hormonally predisposed to avoid meat that could potentially be contaminated, which could affect pregnancy, while men may have sought out meat protein due to their history as hunter-gatherers in some societies.
But Rosenfeld said that viewing men as hunters is also linked to culture. This is a good example of another theory, which is that social norms shape gender identity from an early age and thus people decide how much they can fill their plate.
Rosenfeld, who said he stopped eating meat about 10 years ago, said his own experience “as a guy hanging out with other male friends” in college reflected the cultural pressure on men to eat meat. “If they’re all eating meat and I decide not to, that can disrupt the natural flow of social situations,” he said.
The same cultural factors that shape gender affect how people respond to new information, said Caroline Semler, a psychology professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia. She also studies social factors such as meat eating and gender. Semler was not involved in this study. In some of her previous work, she has studied the cognitive dissonance around meat eating.
In such cases, when informed about poor animal welfare in the livestock industry, women said they would reduce their meat consumption. But men thought the opposite, she said.
“One participant said to me, ‘I think you guys are telling me to eat less meat, so I’ll eat more meat,'” she said.
Semler said meat can be important to masculine identity, given the popular perception of men at the grill, for example. And he said presenting eating less meat as a moral cause can be a sensitive issue. Still, he said, people should be aware of how their food choices affect the planet.
But he and Hopwood acknowledged how difficult it is to change behavior.
“It’s a hard thing to beat men,” Hopwood said.
Jose Lopez, another diner at the Dog House Grill, said he believes men should eat less meat, but in general he has noticed the opposite.
He said, “We are non-vegetarians. Men eat like wild animals.”
