CHICAGO– On vacation from Europe this week in Chicago, Jelle den Burger and Nirusa Naguleswaran grabbed a bite to eat at the Dog House Grill: a classic Italian beef sandwich for him, grilled cheese for her.
They both think the way their genders aligned with their food choices was no coincidence. Women, Naguleswaran said, are simply more likely to give up meat and worry about how their diet affects the environment and other people.
“I don’t mean to say in a wrong way, that men feel attacked,” said Naguleswaran, from the Netherlands, laughing. She said she loved eating meat, but giving it up for weather reasons was more important to her. “It is in our nature to care about others.”
Now, scientists can say with more confidence than ever that gender and meat-eating preferences are linked. An article published this week in Scientific Reports shows that the difference is almost universal between cultures – and that it is even more pronounced in more developed countries.
Researchers already knew that men in some countries ate more meat than women. And they knew that people in richer countries ate more meat in general. 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 more, with men eating more meat and women eating less.
This is important because about 20% of global planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions come from animal-based food products, according to previous research at 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 could be done to reduce meat consumption in men would have a greater impact, on average, than in women,” said Christopher Hopwood, professor of psychology at the University of Zurich and one of the paper’s authors. The work was based on research 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 every 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 standard of living, to rate how “developed” each country was, and they also looked at the Global Gender Gap Index, a scale of equality gender issues published by the World Economic Forum. .
They found that, with three exceptions – China, India and Indonesia – gender differences in meat consumption were greater in countries with higher development and gender equality scores.
The sheer number and cultural diversity of the people interviewed 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 didn’t answer the question of why men tend to eat more meat, but scientists have some theories. One is that, evolutionarily, women may have been hormonally programmed to avoid meat that could be contaminated, affecting pregnancy, while men may have sought meat proteins due to their history as hunters in some societies.
But even the idea of men as hunters is intertwined with culture, Rosenfeld said. This is a good example of another theory, which says that social norms shape gender identity from a young age and, therefore, how people choose to fill their plates.
Rosenfeld, who said he stopped eating meat about 10 years ago, said his own experience in college “as a guy hanging out with other friends” illustrated the cultural pressure for men to eat meat. “If everyone eats meat and I decide not to,” he said, “it could disrupt the natural flow of social situations.”
The same cultural factors that shape gender influence how people respond to new information, said Carolyn Semmler, a psychology professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia who also studies meat consumption and social factors like gender. Semmler was not involved in this study. In some of her previous work, she studied the cognitive dissonance surrounding meat consumption.
In these cases, she said women who were given 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 in the other direction, she said.
“One participant said to me, ‘I think you’re trying to get me to eat less meat, so I’ll eat more,’” she said.
Semmler said meat can be important to male identity, noting, for example, the popular notion of grilled men. And she said presenting eating less meat as a moral cause can be a tricky 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 behavior.
“Men are a tough nut to crack,” Hopwood said.
José Lopez, another Dog House Grill restaurant, said he thinks men should eat less meat, but said he has generally observed the opposite.
“We are carnivores. Men eat like savages,” he said.
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This story was first published on June 13, 2024. It was updated on June 14, 2024 to correct the name of the academic journal in which the study was published to Scientific Reports.
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Follow Melina Walling on X: @Melina Walling.
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