Go the Whole Nine Yards? How Extent of Meat Restriction Impacts Individual Dietary Experience

ABSTRACT

This study examined three meat-restricted diets (N = 865)—a vegetarian diet, a reduced-meat diet, and a chicken-free diet—with a focus on the differences in lived dietary experiences operationalized using measures such as satisfaction with food-related life and the theory of planned behavior. The data comes from an online survey of a census-balanced sample of 30,000+ U.S. residents. The findings showed that meat reducers are a larger group than suspected and that there was a statistically significant difference in dietary experiences with vegetarians reporting better experiences with their diet. This research speaks to how the type of meat restriction impacts lived experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Vegetarian
• meat reduction
• chicken avoidance
• sociology of food
• dietary experiences

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Cherry and Dr. Gary Bowden for their significant contributions to this work as well as many individuals in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. They would also like to thank those who provided feedback on the research during the design phase.

Disclosure Statement

The authors have no other declarations of interest.

Correction Statement

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

Notes

¹ For more on the make-up of the weighted cleaned sample leaving the screener see Asher (2017).

1. Vegetarianism is being used herein as a shorthand for a meat-free diet and so includes veganism (a diet that additionally excludes eggs, dairy, and other animal products).

2. Nielsen was not responsible for any survey design, data analysis, or reporting.

3. Attention checks or IMCs can be used to identify inattentive respondents on self-administered surveys to address quality issues (Berinsky, Margolis, and Sances 2014, 739). One such question was used as the last question of the screener, with wording loosely based on the work of Berinsky, Margolis, and Sances (2014). Those who failed this IMC as well as an additional check (a double fail) were not permitted to proceed given that respondent quality can be an issue with online panel respondents.

4. Population estimates from the United States Census Bureau for the resident population 18 years and over for the U.S. (the focus of the survey sample) for October 2016 (the month the bulk of the data was collected) were needed to answer this question. However, at the time of analysis, the bureau did not yet have estimates for the population 18 years of age or older as of October 1, 2016. This was instead calculated using available estimates (United States Census Bureau 2016a, 2016b).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council; University of New Brunswick; New Brunswick Innovation Foundation; VegFund; and a fiscal sponsorship managed by Faunalytics. Grantors had no role in the research process. Dr. Asher worked at Faunalytics during the time the data was collected.