Real men don’t eat (vegetable) quiche: Masculinity and the justification of meat consumption.

TLDR

Growing evidence that meat harms the environment, public health, and animals is increasing pressure on meat eaters to justify their consumption. Male undergraduates used direct justifications—pro‑meat attitudes, denial of animal suffering, hierarchical views, religious and health rationales—linked to masculinity and higher meat intake, whereas female students employed indirect dissociation strategies associated with lower meat consumption, supporting Adams’s theory that feminism and vegetarianism are connected and indicating that appeals to health or environment may overlook the masculine identity motive.

Abstract

As arguments become more pronounced that meat consumption harms the environment, public health, and animals, meat eaters should experience increased pressure to justify their behavior. Results of a first study showed that male undergraduates used direct strategies to justify eating meat, including endorsing pro-meat attitudes, denying animal suffering, believing that animals are lower in a hierarchy than humans and that it is human fate to eat animals, and providing religious and health justifications for eating animals. Female undergraduates used the more indirect strategies of dissociating animals from food and avoiding thinking about the treatment of animals. A second study found that the use of these male strategies was related to masculinity. In the two studies, male justification strategies were correlated with greater meat consumption, whereas endorsement of female justification strategies was correlated with less meat and more vegetarian consumption. These findings are among the first to empirically verify Adams’s (1990) theory on the sexual politics of meat linking feminism and vegetarianism. They suggest that to simply make an informational appeal about the benefits of a vegetarian diet may ignore a primary reason why men eat meat: It makes them feel like real men.