Our Daily Meat: Justification, Moral Evaluation and Willingness to Substitute

Publication date: Available online 21 September 2019Source: Food Quality and PreferenceAuthor(s): Christina Hartmann, Michael SiegristAbstractThe enjoyment of meat and simultaneous disapproval of hurting animals create an ambivalent relationship with meat consumption. Meat-eating justification strategies are a means of coping with such cognitive dissonance. We aimed to determine whether the use of such justification strategies to defend meat consumption is linked to the moral evaluation of diverse free-range, wild and conventional meat production systems (e.g. free-range chicken, wild fish and veal from conventional production). Moreover, we endeavoured to assess how these justification strategies are linked to the consumption of meat and consumers’ willingness to substitute (WTS) meat with alternatives. An online survey was conducted with 973 participants from Germany (49% men and 51% women) to assess meat-eating justification strategies (apologetic and unapologetic justification), moral evaluation of 12 meat (including fish) production systems, frequency of meat (including processed meat) consumption as well as WTS meat. All unapologetic justification strategies (e.g. denial of animals’ suffering and health justification) correlated positively with meat consumption (between r = .14 and r = .42, p < .001) and negatively with WTS meat (between r = -.31 and r = -.51, p < .001). Even though participants evaluated most of the conventional animal production systems to...
Source: Food Quality and Preference - Category: Food Science Source Type: research