CHICAGO — Jelle den Burger and Nirusa Naguleswaran, on vacation from Europe in Chicago this week, had dinner at It House Grill: classic Italian beef sandwiches for him, grill for her.
Both believe it’s no coincidence that their gender coincides with their food choices. According to Naguleswara, women are concerned about the impact of their meat consumption on the environment and other people.
“I don’t want to mislead men into feeling that they are under attack,” said Naguleswaran of the Netherlands, laughing. He said he likes to eat meat, but avoiding the weather is more important to him. “It is in our nature to care about others.”
Scientists can now say with more certainty than ever that sex and meat cravings are related.
A paper published this week in the journal Nature Scientific Reports shows that this difference is universal across cultures and is most pronounced in more developed countries.
Research has found that in some countries, men eat more meat than women. They know that people in rich countries eat regular meat.
But recent findings show that when men and women have social and financial freedom to make dietary choices, men tend to overeat and women tend to drift further away.
This is important because, according to previous research from the University of Illinois, about 20% of global greenhouse gases come from animal-based foods.
The researchers behind the new report think their findings can inform efforts to encourage people to eat less meat and dairy.
This work is funded by Mercy for Animals, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending animal agriculture. Hopwood said he is not affiliated with the organization and is not an attorney.
They use the UN’s Human Development Index, which measures health, education and living standards, to determine how “developed” each country is, as well as the Global Gender Gap Index, a measure of gender equality published by the World Economic Forum. .
They found that gender differences in meat consumption were higher in countries with high development scores and gender equality—with three exceptions—China, India, and Indonesia.
Research has not answered the question of why men tend to eat more meat, but scientists have several theories.
One possibility is that evolutionary women are more hormonally hard-wired to avoid meat, which can contaminate and affect fertility, while men, given their history as hunter-gatherers in some societies, can seek out meat protein.
According to Rosenfeld, even the idea of men being hunters is cultural. This is a good example of another theory, that social norms shape gender identity from childhood, and that’s how people decide to fill their plates.
Rosenfeld, who said he stopped eating meat about 10 years ago, said his experience in college “as a guy hanging out with other guy friends” reflected the cultural pressure for men to eat meat.
The same cultural factors that shape gender affect how people view new information, says Caroline Semmler, a psychology professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia who also studies social factors such as meat consumption and gender.
Sammler is not involved. In some of his previous works, he studied cognitive disorders surrounding meat eating.
In such cases, she says, women in the livestock sector who know about animal welfare will reduce their meat consumption. But men tend to go the other way, she says.
“I think you guys are trying to make me eat less meat, so I will eat more,” one attendee told me.
Sammler notes that meat can be important to masculine identity, as is the widespread notion of men grilling. Also, he said, the moral recommendation to eat less meat can be a sensitive issue. However, people should be aware of how their food choices affect the planet’s environment, he said.
