Disgust Reactions to Meat Among Ethically and Health Motivated Vegetarians

Expressions of disgust at the idea of eating, handling, or even seeing meat have often been reported in studies of vegetarianism. Reasons for such reactions have rarely, however, been examined. Neither an ethical stance nor health concerns regarding meat consumption obviously indicate such a reaction. This article presents findings from research utilizing in-depth interviews with vegetarians variously motivated by ethical, health, and other concerns and with meat eaters. A clear difference was found in the sample regarding disgust reactions to meat between those who avoided meat consumption for ethical reasons and those who avoided it for reasons of health. Rather than concluding that avoidance of meat stems from revulsion or that revulsion is the consequence of avoidance of meat, the article concludes that meat is a substance that evokes, independently, both ethical concerns and feelings of revulsion and that the latter is heightened by the former.

The research project upon which this article is based was funded by the Research Endowment Trust of the University of Reading to which thanks is due. The research was carried in full compliance with the University’s guidelines on the conduct of research involving human subjects. All those who took part in the study were fully informed about its aims, their anonymity was guaranteed, and all gave their full consent.

Keywords:

• Diet
• disgust
• ethics
• food
• health
• meat

Notes

The research project upon which this article is based was funded by the Research Endowment Trust of the University of Reading to which thanks is due. The research was carried in full compliance with the University’s guidelines on the conduct of research involving human subjects. All those who took part in the study were fully informed about its aims, their anonymity was guaranteed, and all gave their full consent.

¹Those brought up vegetarian are all counted as having added one or motives to their original “motive.” In all but one case who disliked meat, they had come to adopt an ethical stance on meat eating.

²Letters and numbers after quotations from the interviews are used to identify individual respondents. LC stands for local contact, FC for customers of a local food co-operative, VM for readers of a vegetarian magazine, and SB for respondents found through snowball selection using multiple points of entry. This is the largest category since most respondents were selected in that way. ME stands for meat eater.

³ Rozin, Markwith, and Stoess (1997) found that ethical vegetarians tended to believe that eating meat can produce personality and behavioral effects. They devised a measure of such belief using three questions that asked whether respondents believed that meat made consumers behave more like animals, more aggressive and violent and, causes undesirable changes in people’s personalities. Ethical vegetarians scored significantly higher than health vegetarians on this measure. The absolute proportions of the sample who actually agreed with the propositions presented to them which constituted the measure were, however, very small at around 1% of the sample. This actually lends support to the points made here.