Identity processes and food choice: predictors of dietary lapses among ethical and health vegans

ABSTRACT

An interesting finding in the literature on vegetarianism and veganism finds that vegetarians and vegans often report that they deviate from their diets from time to time. Work examining this phenomenon finds that these dietary lapses relate to many factors; however, little research examines how these factors collectively influence dietary lapses while also controlling for the relationships that may exist among factors. Here, I fill this gap by drawing from the unified model of vegetarian identity (UMVI) and identity theory (IT) to propose an inclusive model of dietary lapses. Structural equation model results from a sample of 488 vegans reveal differences in how identity and interactional processes relate to dietary lapses across ethical and health motivations. This work is important because it highlights how identities relate to dietary behaviors differently for ethical and health vegans; it also provides fruitful avenues for future work in this area.

KEYWORDS:

• Vegan
• dietary lapses
• identity
• social identity recognition
• social interaction
• ethical vegan
• health vegan
• dietary adherence

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the Graduate Student Senate and University Research Council at Kent State University for the support that made this work possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DFBEOM

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DFBEOM..

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. This term is used to describe vegetarianism as well as veganism.

2. This definition is identical to the UMVI’s definition of centrality. However, since recent identity theory work outlines the distinction between this shared definition and definitions of “centrality” in other social psychological work (Markowski & Serpe, 2021), this idea is hereafter referred to as identity prominence.

3. Among these 98 people, primary reason for being vegan was varied, as 23 indicated environmental reasons, 6 indicated because of world hunger, 3 indicated political reasons, 10 indicated religious reasons, 6 indicated because of family or friends, 2 indicated in order to save money, 31 indicated taste preferences, 11 were born and raised vegan, 4 selected “Other,” and 2 refused to answer.

4. This pathway yielded a marginally significant difference (p = .07) across ethical and health vegans. Because this difference approaches conventional levels of significance and because the goodness of fit slightly decreases when constrained as equal, I retain separation of this pathway across vegans in the analysis.

5. Four error covariances were estimated but are not presented here. Results are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the Graduate Student Senate and University Research Council at Kent State University.

Notes on contributors

Kelly L. Markowski

Kelly L. Markowski is a Senior Researcher in the Government Resource Center (GRC) at the Ohio State University, where her work evaluates central aspects of the Ohio Department of Medicaid's Next Generation of Managed Care program. She also holds affiliate status in the Rural Drug Addiction Research (RDAR) center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her independent research spans identity theory, social networks, veganism, and substance use.