Food in the current model is not sustainable and does not work for everyone. The impact of meat industry has increased with harmful environmental effects, bigger greenhouse emissions, or even putting at risk the health of those who consume it. At the same time, ethical issues related to Animal Rights or ecological waste are also growing as a political trend, i.e., the concern of how animals are being treated is far from being a responsibility restricted to vegetarians. Nevertheless, this growing trend requires a deeper understanding of how people think about meat consumption. In Portugal, there are still few studies that qualify and quantify the phenomenon of vegetarianism. In this qualitative research, we explore the motivations behind vegetarians’ food choices; we look for evidence of magical thinking (law of contagion and law of similarity) in vegetarians’ decision not to eat meat-related food or other food considered to be impure; and we compare health and moral vegetarians. 35 semi-structured interviews were conducted with open-ended questions (14 moral vegetarians, 14 health vegetarians and 7 omnivores), presenting each participant with 5 different scenarios. Collected data was analysed using thematic analysis. We identified magical thinking as part of vegetarians’ reasoning for not eating meat-related food; and we identified differences between health vegetarians and moral vegetarians on this matter. Results seem to point out that, compared to health vegetarians, moral vegetarians offered more reasons related to contagion for not eating food they perceive as “contaminated” with meat; but they were not more disgusted by violations of “purity” unrelated to meat, or food that posed no ethical issues. On the other hand, health vegetarians, compared to moral vegetarians, offered more repulse responses with vegetarian food resembling meat, and did not offer resistance for eating food perceived as “contaminated” with meat. These findings are consistent with Rouzin’s quantitative research on the moralization process in the field of food studies (Rozin et al. 1997; Rozin et al. 1999). Further research is needed to understand if the current food market is catering enough variety for all types of vegetarians.

--

contagion,disgust,ethics,health,magical thinking,moral,purity,similarity,vegetarianism

• Psicologia - Ciências Sociais