Avocados get the blame when meat-eaters defend their eating habits

Most people know it already. It is not good for the climate when we continue to eat as much meat as we do. It is still difficult to accept that it is the individual’s responsibility to change their diets to reduce our carbon footprint.

This is according to associate professor and sociologist Kia Ditlevsen from the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH).

She has done a sociological research project which had 35 Danes in six groups attempting to reach agreement on the most effective way to reduce our dietary CO2 footprint.

First the participants had to answer what changes are needed if we want to make our diet as climate-friendly as possible.

There was overwhelming agreement among participants that becoming vegan or vegetarian were among the most effective measures.

»But when they got the next question, then their answers got more interesting,« says Ditlevsen.

The next question was: What would you rather change yourself? Most participants now began to come up with excuses to defend their position as meat-eaters.

»As most of the participants ate meat, and at the same time pointed to meat as a climate problem, we could see many examples in the subsequent discussion of how consumers ‘defended’ their continued meat eating practices. They did it by, for example, pointing to other climate problems, or they did it by judging other people – especially vegans,« says Ditlevsen.

And here there was ingenuity:

»They turned it into a ridiculous position to be vegan and portrayed the vegan as a climate hypocrite who eats highly processed substitutes that require a lot of energy to produce. They considered vegan products to be just as harmful to the climate as meat,« says Kia Ditlevsen.

A majority of the participants tried by means of these excuses to uphold a self-image as a moral person that thinks logically and coherent – even when the arguments are wrong, she says:

»Because you could then argue that very few vegans only live on highly processed products, or that meat is more damaging to the climate than the processed products that they pointed to.«

The ridiculed avocado

The excuse then, was that it was not only meat-eaters who did something wrong. The others did also.

As an example of the use of excuses in connection with extreme positions, Kia Ditlevsen mentions the groups’ discussions about avocado eating.

»When we talked about avocados, the grey areas disappeared again, and some of the participants said: »It is hypocritical to eat avocado when you at the same time say you want to do something good for the climate.« The avocado became a symbol for people who say they are doing something good for the climate and yet not doing it,« says Ditlevsen.

The sociologist finds the ridicule interesting, because the arguments are invalid.

»While it’s true that avocados in some places are associated with social and environmental problems, when we talk about climate footprint, they have a lower impact than meat,« says Ditlevsen.

The participants would generally prefer to talk about anything else than how they can actually eat less meat.

»Instead of reducing meat consumption, they would rather talk about how to avoid wasting food and packaging. Even though this is also an important topic, it is a secondary issue in relation to meat consumption when we are talking about reducing the climate footprint,« says Kia Ditlevsen.

The climate shame of meat-eaters

She is aware that eating habits are difficult to change. They are about social relationships and what we humans do on a daily basis in our everyday lives. And this is a challenge.

»I’m interested in people’s daily lives and in the social dynamics that take place here. I’m primarily focused on food. But it’s just as much the social context that influences what people do that has my research interest,« says Kia Ditlevsen.

She has carried out the project together with Thomas A.M. Skelly. According to Kia Ditlevsen, they both see themselves as food sociologists and sociologists of everyday life. It has affected their way of working that they were surprised by what they discovered along the way.

»We both thought that the most interesting group to study was the large group of Danes who eat meat. Our interest wasn’t really in the vegans,« says Kia Ditlevsen.