by CHICAGO (AP) – On vacation in Chicago this week from Europe, Jelle den Burger and Nirusa Naguleswaran grabbed a bite at the Dog House Grill: a classic Italian beef sandwich for him, grilled cheese for him.
Both think it’s no coincidence that their gender has matched their food preferences. Women, Naguleswaran said, are more likely to cut back on meat, and to be careful about the impact their diet has on the environment and others.
“I don’t want to put it the wrong way, that people feel attacked,” Naguleswaran, from the Netherlands, said with a laugh. She said she loves to eat meat, but it was more important for her to give it up for climate reasons. “It’s our nature to care for others.”
Now, scientists can say with more confidence than ever that there is a link between gender preferences and meat-eating. A paper published in Nature Scientific Reports this week 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 ate more meat than women. And they knew that people in wealthier countries ate more meat overall. But the latest findings suggest that when men and women have the social and financial freedom to make choices about their diets, they diverge even further, with men eating more meat and women eating less.
That’s important because about 20% of global planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions come from animal-based food products, according to earlier research from the University of Illinois. The researchers behind the new report think their findings could fine-tune efforts to persuade people to eat less meat and dairy.
“Anything that one could do to reduce meat consumption in men would have a bigger impact, on average, among women,” said Christopher Hopwood, professor of psychology at the University of Zurich and one of to the authors of the paper. The work benefited from surveys funded by Trócaire d’Animhithe, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending animal agriculture. Hopwood said he is not affiliated with the organization and is not an advocate.
The researchers asked more than 28,000 people in 23 countries on four continents how much of the different types of food they ate each day, and then calculated the average consumption of land animals by gender identity in each country. They used the United Nations’ Human Development Index, which measures health, education and living standards, to rank how “developed” each country was, and also looked at the Global Gender Gap Index, a scale of gender equality 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 higher development and gender equality scores.
The sheer number and cultural diversity of the people surveyed is a “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 study.
The study did not answer the question of why men tend to eat more meat, but scientists have several theories. One is that women may have evolved hormonally to avoid potentially tainted meat, which interfered with 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 culture, Rosenfeld said. That’s a good example of another theory, which is that societal norms shape gender identity from a very young age and therefore how people decide to fill their plates.
Rosenfeld, who said he stopped eating meat about 10 years ago, said his own experience hanging out in college “as a guy hanging out with other friends” reflected the cultural pressure on meat men to eat. “If they’re all eating meat and I decide not to,” he said, “it can disrupt the natural flow of social situations.”
The same cultural factors that shape gender affect how people respond to new information, said Carolyn Semmler, a professor of psychology at the University of Adelaide in Australia who also studies meat eating and social factors like gender. Semmler was not involved in this study. In some of her past work, she has studied cognitive dissonance in eating meat.
In those cases, she said, women who received information about animal abuse in the livestock industry were more likely to say they would reduce their meat consumption. But men tended to go the other way, she said.
“One participant said to me, ‘I think you guys want me to eat less meat, so I’m going to eat more,'” she said.
Semmler said that meat can be important to masculine identity, noting for example the common concept of men at the grill. And she said that eating less meat as a moral cause is a sensitive issue. Still, she said, people should be aware of how their food choices affect the planet.
But she and Hopwood acknowledged how difficult it is to change behaviour.
“Men are a tough nut to crack,” Hopwood said.
Jose Lopez, another diner at the Dog House Grill, said he thought the men should eat less meat but said he has generally noticed the opposite.
“We are carnivores. Men eat like savages,” he said.
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Follow Melina Walling on X: @MelinaWalling.
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