More and more people are becoming vegetarian. Some are doing so for health reasons, in order to reduce the amount of cholesterol and saturated fat in their diets. Others are choosing to eat less meat for ethical reasons, including concerns about animal rights. Many are also interested in lessening their environmental impact.
The increasing popularity of meat-free and low-meat diets is widespread across geographic regions and age groups. However, there is one segment of society that is continuing to hold fast to meat. Men are much less likely than women to try vegetarian options.
Recently, a team of researches from several universities set out to explore why this might be. They released their results in the latest issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. They found that people strongly associate eating meat with being tough, assertive and masculine.
People seem to think of eating meat--especially red meat, such as hamburgers, steaks and bacon--as a manly thing to do. There is an intense metaphorical connection between meat and masculinity that runs deep in American culture.
Interestingly, this connection appears to be the same in many European cultures. While the study was mostly performed in the United States and Great Britain, the researches also examined the languages of 23 other cultures.
The results require a brief explanation. Many languages other than English assign genders to their nouns. For example, in a language in which bookcase was a feminine noun, you would use the same pronoun when referring to the bookcase as you would when referring to a woman you knew. You can see the remnants of this in the way that English speakers call a ship "she" and "her". The researchers found that most of those 23 languages used masculine pronouns when talking about meat.
The fact that the association between men and meat can be found across so many cultures and is embedded in the very words that people use suggests that it is a deep and persistent one. Health educators, vegetarian advocates and marketers of meat alternatives will have to look for creative and compelling ways to convince men that replacing red meat with plant-based meals is not a threat to their self-image.
The results of the study show that people have both conscious and unconscious thoughts connecting masculinity and meat. In one of the tests, the researchers asked participants to rate which foods were more or less masculine. The foods under consideration included meat, dairy products and vegetables. Of these, meat was consistently rated as the most masculine. Both men and women were included in the study, and groups of both genders consider meat to be more macho than vegetables.
From this result, it is clear that people are aware of the metaphorical link between red meat and traditional masculinity. However, this connection also operates at a deeper level. The researchers found that people consistently used more masculine words when speaking about meat than when discussing other types of food.
This seems to suggest that thinking about meat makes people--both men and women--feel more connected to masculine ways of communicating.
Perhaps the most important result of the study is that the participants viewed men who were eating meat as more masculine than men eating other types of food. This points to the dynamic at the heart of many men's reluctance to consume less meat; they do not want to be perceived as weak or feminine. This is very important and compelling to most men. While it may be an unspoken argument, many men find it more persuasive than all the facts about health and environmental impact that advocates for vegetarianism point to.
The researchers conclude that marketers of veggie burgers and other meat alternatives need a new approach. They suggest altering the aesthetics of soy products to make them more closely resemble meat in terms of shape, color and texture. For example, the addition of grill marks might signal that a veggie burger is not really that different from a hamburger.
There may be other ways of approaching the problem. A clever ad campaign might try to appeal to men's vanity and desire to lose weight by using attractive female actors speaking lines such as, "You might think that steak is manly, but nothing is manlier than 6-pack abs."
The question remains: will men join the growing ranks of vegetarians? How might they reconcile eating tofu with their self-image?
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