Meat and the Placebo Effect

Eating meal is a terribly inefficient way to get your calories and nutrients.

Raising animals for food requires very large amounts of water and vegetation input. Over half the grain produced in the US is used to feed livestock, and thousands of gallons of water goes into each ounce of beef. Then, of course, consider all the extra fossil fuels burned and energy expended transporting the feed to the animals and in the actual slaughtering. For more detailed information, check out the pages here or here.

Really, it is hard to justify all the waste inherent in the system, especially in a world of rising food prices, increasingly privatized water, and peak oil.

And, as it turns out, you may not even be able to justify your meat-eating guilty habits by your "taste" for meat. Check out this article from Live Science about a new study, reproduced below:

Meat Eaters Live a Lie

While a big, juicy steak may indeed be culinary nirvana for many, your taste for beef could be based in part on expectation rather than reality.

On the assumption that meat is associated with social power in some peoples' minds, researchers rated study participants on what they call a Social Power Value Endorsement measure, to determine their preferences for meat and their cultural perceptions of it. Participants were then told they would taste either a beef sausage roll or a vegetarian roll. You can guess where this is headed.

Of course the researchers used one of the oldest tricks in the social scientist's toolbox: They lied.

Some participants got what they were told was coming, and others unknowingly ate the other type of roll. Then they all filled out questionnaires about how they like the food.

"Participants who ate the vegetarian alternative did not rate the taste and aroma less favorably than those who ate the beef product," the researchers report in August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. "Instead, what influenced taste evaluation was what they thought they had eaten and whether that food symbolized values that they personally supported."

The study was done by Michael W. Allen at the University of Sydney, Richa Gupta from the University of Nashville, and Arnaud Monnier of the National Engineer School for Food Industries and Management, France. A second test done with a popular, status-heavy soft drink and a dime-store brand yielded similar results.