How a month of abstinence can lead to 'meat disgust'
www.bbc.com
There are some surprising impacts of cutting out meat, even for a short period, which can carry on well beyond the end of abstinence.
    • glimse@lemmy.world
      8·
      14 hours ago

      That’s called an anecdote and I’ve got one, too: I stopped eating red meat and now I don’t find beef or lamb appetizing at all.

      Seems like it doesn’t happen to everyone and the article agrees with that

      Of the 40 participants, 28 reported an increase in meat disgust.

      • ThirdConsul
        10·
        13 hours ago

        Of the 40 participants, 28 reported an increase in meat disgust.

        A study on a group of 40 is an anecdote at best, a waste of resources at worst.

        Reporting on it in on a big news website should be a crime, as it’s just a clickbait.

        • usernamesAreTrickyOP
          23·
          13 hours ago

          The article also site other studies too. (It calls the N=40 preliminary early research)

          • ThirdConsul
            7·
            13 hours ago

            From another study with N=700:

            We measured self-reported meat consumption, meat disgust (by self-report and Implicit Association Test),

            IAT is phrenology of social studies. You can discard it as garbage. If a study is using IAT as methodology, it’s garbage done to gain some publication points.

            You can read more about IAT: https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/10.1027/1015-5759/a000778

    • usernamesAreTrickyOP
      64·
      13 hours ago

      They are primarily looking at moral disgust here. It can be appealing to taste buds and morally disgusting at the same time

      • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
        1·
        10 hours ago

        I feel this. Eat meat just about every day, because I’m a caregiver and cook for others, and it’s just too much work to cook multiple meals every night. But at this point I am very ready to cut out meat, and have occasional meat disgust. What’s weird is that I’ve had it since I was a kid. It’s this random thing where 99% I have no gross out vibe with it at all, but every once in a blue moon the thought of it just makes me queasy, especially if I’ve recently reduced the amount I’m eating (like when we buy impossible burgers or go on a tofu kick)

  • EpheraEnglish
    31·
    12 hours ago

    Meat disgust is really interesting to me. A few months ago, I had steak-shaped TVP, which is basically defatted soy beans that get put into the shape and texture of meat.

    I myself prepared it. I saw it go from being dry like a brick to having been soaked in vegetable stock to being fried.
    And still, when I took my first bite of it, my body kicked in a gag reflex, because it was convinced I was biting into meat.

    I also haven’t bitten into meat in 15 years, which is what makes this so crazy to me.
    The taste reminded me of chicken (which was ultimately just the protein having undergone the Maillard reaction during frying) and the chewiness perhaps unsurprisingly did remind me of a steak. So, if I had been served that in a restaurant, I might not have trusted it to not be meat. But that’s not what happened then. It was just an instinctive reaction to something I haven’t experienced in 15 years.

    In my particular case, it might also be a form of internalized trauma, because there was a time period, when I already found meat disgusting before going vegetarian (less so than after, but still) and my parents forced me to eat it anyways, because they thought I was just being a silly child.