<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/vegetarian-vegan-bodybuilding-info/6826169993/sizes/z/in/photostream/" target="_blank">Vegetarian-Vegan-Bodybuilding-Info</a>/Flickr
My mom likes to tell a story about how, after coming over for dinner to our vegetarian household, a woman from the neighborhood earnestly asked her how she had managed to persuade my dad to eat vegetables. Apparently this woman had the worst time interesting her husband in salad. Okay. So, just for fun, let’s leave aside the troubling question of why exactly this lady’s marriage involved this weird infantilization and turn to the much more hilarious matter: Seriously, why didn’t this dude like veggies?
According to a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, it’s probably because men don’t consider them manly. For reals:
In a number of experiments that looked at metaphors and certain foods, like meat and milk, the authors found that people rated meat as more masculine than vegetables. They also found that meat generated more masculine words when people discussed it, and that people viewed male meat eaters as being more masculine than non-meat eaters.
Another rad finding was that in most languages that have genders, meat is masculine.
As a solution, the study’s authors suggest that “reshaping soy burgers to make them resemble beef or giving them grill marks might help cautious men make the transition.” See, ladies with veggie-hating husbands? It’s that easy.
