Why Giving Up Meat May Be Harder for Some of Us
The air in Boston’s Reggie Lewis Athletic Center is full of the aroma of meat. “Smells pretty good in here,” says a woman dressed in a floor-length, flowery skirt, as she enters an ultracrowded hall. Hundreds of people are pressed close together, slowly pushing toward the myriad stands ahead. Something delicious is being cooked inside, that’s for sure. As we approach, the scent grows stronger, and I can make out sausages, crispy bacon, juicy burgers, all being cooked fresh.
Yet there is no meat in sight.
The event to which the crowds have swarmed is the annual Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. Everything edible here is made of plants—not even milk or eggs are allowed to cross the threshold. The hall is, of course, packed with vegans and vegetarians. And yet the woman in the hippie-like flowery skirt, perhaps more obviously identifiable as a vegetarian, is an exception. You would never have guessed by looking at most of the people at the center that they are plant eaters attending a vegetarian festival. Some are young, some are old; some are thin, some are fat. Some wear sweatpants, and others wear suede suit jackets with elbow patches.
Surveys have shown that many people think vegetarians are somehow different from the rest of society. To the average American, the folks who turn down meat are pale, pacifist, hypochondriacal, foreign-car-driving liberals. Thus the question becomes: Who are modern vegetarians? Are they born to be plant eaters? Is there something in their genes or personality that makes it easier for them to stop eating meat? Can you tell someone is a vegetarian by scanning his or her brain? And why on Earth do some of them eat fake meat “sausages” and “burgers” and no-fish “tunas”? Are they fooling themselves, secretly craving meat after all?
An American comedian, David Brenner, once said that “a vegetarian is a person who won’t eat anything that can have children.” If only it were so simple. There is no clear-cut definition of a vegetarian on which everyone agrees. Even vegetarians disagree about what constitutes a vegetarian diet. Pescaterians eat no meat but do allow for fish. Others won’t eat fish but think that devouring a plate of mussels is perfectly OK. To add to the confusion, there are pesco pollo vegetarians who avoid red meat but eat chicken and fish, flexitarians who generally avoid meat but still eat it on occasion, and the VB6 folks—who eat only vegan before 6 p.m. but after that hour may dig into steaks. Meanwhile, orthodox vegans won’t even touch honey because it comes from the exploitation of bees.
No wonder it’s hard to tell how many vegetarians are truly out there. Recent estimates show that 3 to 5 percent of Americans consider themselves vegetarian, just like 4 to 8 percent of Canadians, 3 percent of Australians, 2 to 5 percent of British, and a mere 0.3 percent of Portuguese, who appear to be the most meathooked of Western nations. The discrepancies in the statistics come partly from the fact that people who are flexitarians may sometimes say they are vegetarian and sometimes admit they really aren’t—mainly depending on how survey questions are designed. Most studies show that in Western countries, the US included, the numbers of vegetarians are not particularly high. Che Green, executive director of the Harris Interactive Service Bureau, went so far as to call vegans and vegetarians “a blip on the demographic radar.” He said: “Statistically speaking, we’re below the margin of error for most surveys.”
And yet, one can’t help but feel that vegetarianism is on the rise. It seems that wherever you look, there is a vegetarian celebrity: Natalie Portman, Anne Hathaway, Liv Tyler, Pamela Anderson, Moby, Alanis Morissette, Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Dustin Hoffman—the list goes on. In Europe, the world’s first vegan supermarket chain, Veganz, is opening one new location after another, and similar stores are popping up all over North America. Flip through a newspaper, turn on the TV, or scroll through the trending topics your friends are posting to social media, and soon enough you’ll find even more hints that folks may be leaving the ranks of meat eaters in droves.
The most common reasons people cite for why they go “veg” are health and animal welfare. Although, admittedly, some people may have more obscure motivations. As Saturday Night Live comedian A. Whitney Brown once joked: “I am not a vegetarian because I love animals. I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.” Health vegetarians usually change their diets slowly, eliminating meats one by one, starting with red, then ditching poultry, and finally dropping fish. Those who stop eating meat for animal reasons often do so more suddenly. They may watch an undercover slaughterhouse video or see an animal killed in front of them and immediately decide to stop eating all meat—scientists call it a “conversion experience.”
Psychologists say that it’s easier to cut meat out of your diet when you are going through big life changes such as divorce or moving to college. Giving up beef or pork is a lot about rejecting identities. Sharing food solidifies social bonds and makes people feel they belong. If you are Chinese and stop eating rice, for example, you are casting off a large part of your ethnic background. The same goes for saying no to an American Thanksgiving turkey. While moving to a new city, or a new country, it’s easier to shed not only your previous geographically identified self but also your meat-eating self. Easier—yet rarely easy, since vegetarian clichés can discourage many from joining the ranks of the meatless.
When I meet Kate Jacoby at the Vedge restaurant in Philadelphia, a vegetarian-food haven she runs with her husband, chef Richard Landau, she doesn’t strike me as a stereotypical vegan. Dressed in neat slacks and a tailored cream top that complements her light hair, she gives my hand a good shake as she lets me into the empty restaurant, a few hours before opening. Neither does her restaurant conform to vegetarian clichés. Vedge is elegant with a modern twist. Resolutely high-end, there is no hippie stuff anywhere in sight. To my disappointment, the air is devoid of any of the delicious scents that usually fill this place, no savory smells of grilling, no balmy aromas of sauces. Nothing is being cooked on the stoves of Vedge, not yet. The only thing that flows toward me from the kitchen is a rhythmic, unrelenting clack, clack, clack: the sound of countless vegetables being chopped.
Jacoby has been off meat most of her adult life. When I ask her about the clichés surrounding vegetarians, she sighs and says: “There is this need for vegetarians to be perfect. They can never get sick because people will say: ‘Oh, that’s your diet.’ Your vegan shoes can never rip because they’ll say: ‘Oh, these are vegan; these are inferior.’” Jacoby and her husband take pains to take care of themselves to put a good face on the meat-free movement. “We want to have nice hair and look good, set an example,” she tells me, then adds: “I see a lot of animal rights people who take extra steps to make sure they don’t come across as weaklings, and many vegetarian athletes who work out to show people that they can have muscles and be fit.”
For many omnivores, vegetarian clichés can reinforce their commitment to meat-based diets. The author of the recently published The Shameless Carnivore: A Manifesto for Meat Lovers admits, for example, that some meat eaters, including himself, call vegetarians “soy-heads, veggieburgers, communists, the enemy.” In the past, even scientists were not immune to the belief that there was something inherently wrong with vegetarians. Back in the 1940s, the head psychiatrist of one Long Island hospital posited that vegetarians are secretly sadistic and “display little regard for the suffering of their fellow human beings.” Twenty-first-century studies prove that this is simply not true: fMRI scans reveal that if you show vegetarians and omnivores pictures of human suffering, the empathy-related areas of the brain will activate more in the plant-eating group.
Nevertheless, the clichés that surround vegetarians are quite pervasive, even today. In one experiment, researchers presented volunteers with five types of diets, including a vegetarian one, a gourmet one, and a fast-food one, and asked them to describe the personalities of the people who consume such fare—in the spirit of the French writer Brillat-Savarin who famously observed: “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” The results were far from surprising. Fast-food types were believed to be religious, conservative, and fond of polyester clothing. Gourmets were liberal and sophisticated. Vegetarians were foreign-car-driving pacifists. In other studies, meat eaters described vegetarians as generally good people but also weak, weight conscious, and pro-drugs. Another cliché that got stuck to the image of vegetarian men in particular is that of a sex-deprived wimp. Psychologists have found that not only omnivores but even vegetarians think of vegetarians as less masculine. Such notions, of course, stem from the strong connection among meat, blood, power, and manliness that is inscribed in our culture. This perceived lack of masculinity is likely one of the reasons why 30 percent of omnivores say they wouldn’t date a vegetarian. But meat avoiders are often not much into meat eaters, either. In 2007 a new word made headlines in the Anglophone world: “vegansexuality.” The source: a study in New Zealand that showed that vegan women didn’t like meat-eating partners as much as they did plant-eating ones. The word was coined to describe vegans who prefer only to have sex with other vegans. All of a sudden, vegansexuals started “coming out,” which in turn resulted in more clichés being attached to them. On Internet forums, the vegansexuals were called bitter pleasure deniers and “notoriously bad lays.” Such attacks may stem from vegans appearing to reject the cultural norm, which links meat eating with masculinity and sex.
Some vegansexuals claim that vegans really are different—that they even smell different. According to one experiment done in Europe, there may actually be some truth to it: female students rated the scent of men on a meat-based diet as less pleasant than the smell of the very same guys when they went vegetarian for two weeks. Yet a better way to tell if someone is a vegetarian is to look at his or her hair—not the hairstyle or color, mind you, but the hair’s chemical composition. If you send a few locks to a lab, it can be determined by the abundance of 13C and 15N proteins whether their owner’s diet is made up of plants or meat. And if you were really set on checking whether someone is a meat eater, you could also scan his or her brain. By placing electrodes on a person’s scalp to measure electrical activity in the brain, and then showing that person pictures of meat, scientists can see a difference between the reactions of vegetarians and omnivores—meat stimulates a vegetarian brain more than it does an omnivore brain.
Does this mean that vegetarians are somehow fundamentally different from meat eaters, that they are born different? Or do they just become different once they stop eating meat? It appears that, to a certain degree, both these statements are true. Although the scent and hair composition of anyone will change after switching to a plant-based diet, there may be some inborn characteristics that make it easier for some people to give up steaks and bacon in the first place while others may have a genetic makeup that reinforces their desire for meat. A study conducted on British pairs of twins showed, for example, that 78 percent of how much we like meat or fish is heritable—meaning that if your parents dislike beef and pork, you are more likely to have an aversion to them, too. Another study, this time from Brazil, suggested that serotonin receptor genes 5-HT, which are involved in the development of bulimia and binge eating, are also responsible for how much some people like beef, although, to be fair, the effect was pretty small.
There is, however, one more inherited characteristic that could make switching to a completely new diet—like a vegetarian or a vegan one—a bit more difficult for some people. To survive, omnivores, such as humans, rats, and cockroaches, rely on two mechanisms that pull them in opposite directions: food neophilia (a temptation to try new things in case they may be tasty and nutritious) and food neophobia (a fear that these new foods may kill them). Some people are more neophobic than others. Twin studies show that the degree to which we fear novel foods is about two-thirds dependent on what we’ve inherited from our parents. Neophobes are the people who don’t like to check out new restaurants, don’t enjoy ethnic cuisines, and tend to dislike anything they can’t easily recognize. They may also have more aversion to vegetables and fruits and so might be less eager to try, say, veggie burgers—if they haven’t grown up eating them. Neophobes who do become vegetarian tend to eat more junk food or to have a more limited diet: they throw out the meat but replace it with nothing new. From “meat and potatoes” guys, they can turn into “just potatoes” guys.
Studies have linked two more inborn traits that indicate which people are more inclined to switch to a plant-based diet. The first of them is “openness to experience,” one of the big five personality traits (the others being extraversion/introversion, friendliness/hostility, conscientiousness, and neuroticism/emotional stability). People high in openness generally prefer new ideas, are intellectually curious, and lean toward nontraditional values. They are also less likely to be devout meat eaters and, instead, consume more veggies and grains. The second trait connected to meat eating is IQ. Research shows that someone’s IQ at age ten predicts the likelihood of that person becoming a vegetarian later in life: the higher a person’s IQ, the less likely he or she will be a meat lover as an adult.
Yet these apparent differences in personality traits between vegetarians and meat eaters don’t really explain why the members of these two food camps so often cross swords over dinner. But scientists do have an idea of what does.
Evelyn Kimber, president of the Boston Vegetarian Society, is quite unlike Jacoby but is nevertheless still quite different from any of the common hippie-veggie stereotypes. With her simple blouse and a necklace of enamel fruits, she makes me think of home-baked cookies and Sunday neighborhood fairs. Like Jacoby, Kimber believes that the face the vegetarian movement presents to the world is very important if it wants to encourage others to reduce their meat consumption. This face, for starters, should be peaceful and nonconfrontational. That is why at the food festival, of which she was the organizer, no vendor was allowed to display anything with slogans that seem hostile toward meat eaters. “We want meat eaters to feel welcome and our messages to be positive,” she tells me. Kimber herself tries not to behave in any way that would, in her words, “put people off.” That means, for example, using the phrase “I don’t eat meat” in place of “I’m vegan,” which tends to aggravate omnivores more. After all, the very idea of a vegetarian identity is something that can easily turn a nice dinnertime conversation into a heated argument.
Imagine this scene: In a dining room, a table is set. There are candles and linen and a vase brimming with flowers. And food, of course—tons of it. Plates of crispy salads, charred meats, fragrant sauces. There are five people seated at the table: a committed meat lover, an average meat eater, a health vegetarian, an ethical vegetarian, and a vegan. It is an explosive mix.
The meat eater reaches for a platter of chicken and offers it to the vegan. The vegan refuses. A question follows, then an answer, and soon everyone is deep into a heated discussion about the rights and wrongs of eating meat. Voices get raised. Hands gesticulate. And yet, one might wonder: Who are the two seated at the table who are most at odds? Is it the meat lover and the vegan? Not necessarily. More likely, the average meat eater, someone a bit less committed to enjoying animal protein, would turn against the vegan and the ethical vegetarian. Why? A recent experiment showed that people actually argue more fervently when they are less confident about their dietary choices.
People also tend to get more vocal if you criticize their personality rather than just their actions, as in “you are silly” versus “your behavior is silly.” That’s why health vegetarians are usually less touchy about their diets. Since for vegans and for ethical vegetarians (those who went “veg” for the health of the chickens, not their own—to paraphrase Isaac Bashevis Singer) not eating meat is more of a lifestyle choice than a culinary preference, they are also more likely to feel threatened by meat eaters’ accusations. That is also why, in another surprising turn of events at our dinner table, the ethical vegetarian may attack the health vegetarian, whom he perceives—according to surveys—as selfish. The presence of meat eaters would make a conflict between the vegan and the vegetarians more likely, too. In experiments, putting an omnivore between vegans and vegetarians spotlights the moral issues of diets, and vegans start accusing meat-avoiding milk drinkers of being hypocritical. The result is a nasty fight.
In how-to books addressed to vegetarians, there is often some space dedicated to answering meat eaters’ inquiries: Why are you wearing shoes made of leather? What do you feed your pets? Don’t you have to kill vegetables to eat them, too? However, there is rarely any attempt at figuring out why meat eaters ask these questions in the first place, or why vegetarians’ arguments almost never manage to get the omnivores to give up meat. What’s so special about beef or pork that it can turn a dinnertime conversation into an argument? Why doesn’t telling people you don’t eat carrots stir up similar emotions?
Kristin Lajeunesse, an author whom I meet among the leaflet-coated stands of the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival and who quit her office job to wander across the US and write about vegan food, believes that when you tell meat lovers that you don’t eat animals, what they often hear is “Oh, you think I’m a bad person because I like meat.” Lajeunesse is onto something. Studies show that a mere exposure to a plant eater (as opposed to any other dieter) puts omnivores on edge and causes cognitive dissonance, turning on a set of psychological mechanisms that ends up allowing the meat eaters to double down on their carnivory.
We experience cognitive dissonance whenever our beliefs and our behaviors don’t match. Say you think that driving SUVs is bad for the planet, yet you really want a Hummer—you just love how it looks and how it drives—and so you buy it. That nasty feeling you experience whenever you climb into the truck thinking about pollution is cognitive dissonance. You want to get rid of it. You can either change your behavior (sell the car), change your beliefs (that’s difficult and unlikely), or—here comes the most popular option—rationalize your actions. You may tell yourself you had no other choice. That Hummers are safer. That whatever you do won’t impact the climate much anyway.
People who believe that killing animals is perfectly fine may not experience cognitive dissonance about eating meat. But those omnivores who would prefer if the beef or pork on their plates was 100 percent cruelty free (which is impossible unless the meat is lab grown) need to apply what psychologists call “dissonance-reducing strategies” in order to avoid unpleasant feelings—and to be able to maintain their diets. A common strategy, “denigrating the victim,” is to convince yourself that animals are not very smart and that they can’t feel pain. As a journalist for Hog Farm Management once suggested: “Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory.”
To learn more about psychological mechanisms that enable us to justify eating meat, I called Brock Bastian, a researcher at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Bastian was raised a vegetarian but threw in the towel when he was an adult and started eating meat. Yet something seemed not quite right: he kept feeling guilty about his choice of diet. And that is why he set out to investigate what makes people—including himself—so uncomfortable about turning animals into food.
Over the years, Bastian has conducted a series of studies that have shown that eating meat makes people think of animals as rather dumb creatures devoid of emotions. In one of his experiments, Bastian asked the study participants to rate the extent to which a sheep or a cow possessed certain mental capabilities, such as desiring, wishing, and thinking. Later, he told the volunteers they would now take part in another unrelated “consumer behavior” study (that was not true; the studies were very related indeed). Some of the volunteers were asked to write an essay about sampling apples, while a plate of green apples was placed in front of them. Another group had to write about meat, as a dish of roast beef or lamb “infused with rosemary and garlic” was put on the table. Once they finished writing, the experimenter told them he was just going to get some cutlery so they could dig into the dish and asked them to fill out another questionnaire about cows and sheep, as they waited. Again, they had to rate the mental capabilities of the animals. The results confirmed what Bastian suspected all along: people changed their perception of cows’ mental abilities compared to what they had said only minutes earlier if they thought they were just about to eat meat. In the second survey, they described the animals as less smart and less thoughtful than they did before. What’s more, such belittling of animals made the meat eaters feel better. “Thinking of a cow suffering and dying so that we can eat beef makes us uncomfortable,” Bastian tells me. Therefore, we convince ourselves that cows are stupid, cannot perceive much pain anyway, and cannot suffer. This helps us escape the cognitive dissonance and enjoy the roasts and steaks on our plates.
It’s not just eating meat, though, that can make people lose moral concern for animals; even categorizing a species as food may suffice. To check this idea out, Bastian conducted another experiment. This time he made volunteers read slightly different versions of an article about Bennett’s tree kangaroos living in the lush rain forests of Papua New Guinea. Some of the study’s participants learned that tree kangaroos are killed for their meat by local tribes. Others, that these animals are never hunted and never eaten. Afterward, Bastian asked the volunteers how much a kangaroo would suffer if harmed. Those who read the version of the story presenting the animals as food judged this species as not capable of experiencing much pain—a classic dissonance-reducing strategy.
While men are more likely to denigrate animals as a dissonance-reducing technique, women often prefer not to think about the animal at all and disconnect living creatures from the food on their plates: scientists call this approach “dissociation.” What helps them to continue eating meat is our language. After all, it’s easier to forget about dead cows if we brand them “beef” and dead pigs if we call them “pork.” The eighteenth-century Japanese went even further, renaming horsemeat “cherry,” deer “maple,” and wild boar “peony.” In less poetic language, the modern meat industry nevertheless refers to cows and pigs as “grain-consuming animal units.” Would we be so willing to keep eating meat if we called it—as George Bernard Shaw suggested—“scorched corpses of animals”? Probably not. Meanwhile, we don’t have special names for carrots or cabbage. Living or dead, a carrot is still called a carrot—likely because we have no need of hiding where the food comes from since we don’t consider depriving carrots of life a moral issue.
Even the sheer number of animals butchered for meat may help us feel better about eating them. Experiments show that the greater the number of victims—say, of an accident or a natural disaster—the less people are inclined to care. As little as two deaths already seem less worthy of concern than just one. Fifty-eight billion chickens slaughtered across the globe each year thus seems like a mere statistic.
Returning to our heated dinnertime discussion: according to studies, it’s enough for omnivores to face vegetarians, or even just think about them, for their meat-related cognitive dissonance to kick in. It’s an unpleasant feeling, so to push it away, they shift the attention to the vegetarian. By making the vegetarian appear inconsistent and morally dodgy (those leather shoes), the meat eaters can quiet their own inner conflict.
One thing that could help calm the air would be for the vegetarians and the vegan to say that they not only secretly crave meat but actually keep a stash of beef jerky under their beds and munch on it when nobody is around. This would make them less morally threatening. Nor are such meat-eating vegetarians a rare thing, it appears. In one Canadian survey, a mind-boggling 61 percent of “vegetarians” admitted to eating poultry, and 20 percent to occasional feasts of red meat. In another poll, in the US this time, 60 percent of self-proclaimed vegetarians had had some animal flesh within the last twenty-four hours. This means that the number of committed vegetarians and vegans in the US may be as low as 0.3 percent.
These faux vegetarians may be misleading themselves and others as a result of the same force that pushes meat eaters to argue with them: First, they claim to be vegetarian to reduce their own cognitive dissonance. This particular technique involves convincing themselves that they really do avoid meat, evidence to the contrary, since it makes them think they did change their behavior to match their do-no-harm values. Second, despite their best intentions, the meat cravings could just be too strong to resist. That’s particularly true of health vegetarians. When people go “veg” for ethical reasons, they often become disgusted by meat, since disgust is a reaction to things we find morally offensive.
That doesn’t mean that ethical vegetarians don’t get tempted by meat. Some of them do. Take Richard Landau, Jacoby’s famous chef husband. I meet him in Vedge’s surprisingly small kitchen, where a few young cooks are busy peeling rutabagas, the earthy scent of the vegetables filling the air. Just like his wife, Landau defies the weakling-vegetarian stereotype. He talks and moves fast and seems to fill up the space with his presence. When I ask him about meat, he admits: “I miss it all the time,” and then adds: “It’s this meat craving that keeps me on my toes and makes me creative.” Landau tries to recall the flavors of meat using vegetables and, as he calls it, “appeal to our campfire side.” The way to do it is through smoking, he tells me. First, he tried using hickory smoke on his veggies, but that was “too one dimensional,” so he moved to mesquite and apple chips. He also uses marinades. The closest to steak he managed to get so far was grilled seitan that he had soaked in a mixture of rosemary, balsamic vinegar, and peppercorns. “When you cook it, the rosemary gets all perfumy, and the balsamic vinegar caramelizes on the seitan. That really brings out the meatiness,” he says.
Even though Landau keeps craving animal protein, psychology is on his side. It’s easier to avoid eating meat, no matter the temptations, if the thing actually disgusts you, as it often does ethical vegetarians. And yet ethical plant eaters, Landau included, frequently fill their shopping carts and their plates with so-called fake meats: tofurkies, meatless meatballs, and veggie burgers. Is that another proof that even the strictest vegetarians can’t get unhooked from the taste of meat? The answer is yes—and no. Yes, because there is indeed something unusually appealing in meat’s potent mix of umami, fat, and the flavors of the Maillard reaction. That’s what producers of mock meats are working hard to copy. And no, because quite often we keep eating meat simply out of habit.
Habit is a powerful thing. Approximately 45 percent of what we do each day is a habit—an action repeated in more or less the same way in the same place. If we were to make conscious decisions about all everyday behaviors, our prefrontal cortexes would screech under the strain. That’s why we like habits: they are easier on our brains and on our nerves. Same goes for food habits, or what psychologists call “eating scripts.” If we see a barbecue, we think burgers. If we are at a baseball game, we think hot dogs. And when we open our Sunday morning newspaper (or a phone news app), we think fried bacon. We like our habits, and we like the foods we already know. In experiments, people prefer tastes and smells they are familiar with over anything new. To boot, our meat habits get perpetuated by our surroundings, even, for instance, by “regular” families on TV eating their roasts, their burgers, their bacon. We simply follow their example.
As I stroll with Evelyn Kimber around the meat-smelling grounds of the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival, she tells me that it’s actually the omnivores that are the prime audience for all these faux meats and veggie burgers. Such products can help them cut down on meat. “Many people wonder: If I weren’t eating meat, what would I eat?” she says. It’s easier to replace a beef patty on a barbecue with a veggie patty than to make something barbecue-able out of fresh veggies yourself. What’s more, in Western cultures, we are used to a specific plate composition. Basically, there should be meat, a starch, and two vegetables on it. Take out the meat, and not enough is left. What should you cook instead? A dal? A vegetable tagine? It’s simpler to just place meatless meatballs where regular meatballs used to be. And once you start using veggie beef or chicken, they become a habit themselves. So you buy more, no matter whether you crave the taste of meat or not at all.
Lack of cooking skills is also one of the main reasons why some vegetarians go back to eating meat and become—as the media call them—“born-again carnivores.” In surveys they speak of plant-based cooking as “inconvenient” and “too much work.” Chef Richard Landau agrees: “It’s a lot of chopping,” he says with a grin, then adds, “What’s more, each vegetable has a specific level of doneness. Things like turnips—if they are underdone, they are stringy and bitter, and if they are overcooked, they get mushy.” Does that mean you have to be a pro chef to satisfy your taste buds without meat? Of course not. But it does require some learning, and patience. Says Landau: “You have to give vegetables the same attention you would give meat. Really watch them cook, so they get perfect.”
Another major reason why vegetarians turn back into carnivores is lack of social support. A typical ex-vegetarian is a young woman who has just moved in with her meat-eating boyfriend. Not only is cooking two meals too much hassle, but she also feels alone in her choice of diet. It’s difficult to be the odd one, the one who has to explain all the time, argue, and convince. The need to belong—to feel that you are just like others and to share food with them—is a powerful incentive to keep eating meat and a difficult challenge to overcome.
And so it appears that some people in some situations may be more likely than others to give up meat. If your parents don’t like animal protein that much, you are not neophobic, and you don’t have the TT allele of the serotonin receptor genes; if you are liberal, open to experiences, and nonauthoritarian; if you are either single or in a relationship with a vegetarian; and if you find yourself in the midst of big life changes (moving to a new city, getting divorced), there is a higher chance you will cut out meat from your diet. It also appears that adding an ethical edge can make it easier to stop eating animal protein.
Although there is some indication that genetics plays a part in our choice of diet, scientists say that such DNA-based differences in food preferences are not big. What matters far more is the culture in which we grow up. It’s difficult to give up meat because eating it is a habit, because we lack knowledge and skills for cooking vegetarian, and because pervasive vegetarian clichés don’t encourage us to join the ranks of “soy-heads.” Furthermore, we have dissonance-reducing mechanisms that help us continue eating meat. We may think of animals as dumb creatures that cannot feel pain. We may cognitively erase the connection between a living animal and its flesh on our plate and rely on the language to help us do this. And, ironically, the more we doubt that meat eating is the right way to go, the stronger we may react to the vegetarians around us. We may even make them feel so uncomfortable—socially excluded, hassled, and tired—that they finally give up and sink their forks into a piece of beef or pork, or whatever kind of meat their culture pushes them to consume. Even if that meat may be dog.