Regarding cattle consumption:
many of the western lands grazed by cattle are unable to support crops
because of climate, terrain, erodibility, etc. Yes, there are ways to
manage grazed lands in an enviromentally sound way. If cattle were
not raised on these lands, the land would produce no food whatsoever.
The cattle turn the marginal areas into food-production areas.
This is not a case where raising cattle takes grain from the mouths
of starving people.
Jane Sooby
Ag Tech II (Sustainable Ag)
High Plains Ag Lab
3257 Rd. 109
Sidney, NE 69162-3129
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Jan 9 12:07:19 1996
Date: Tue, 09 Jan 96 12:56:24 CST
From: Jane Sooby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: checking ecofem credentials
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Despite our purest principles, where is the "ecofeminist" who
doesn't compromise them on a regular basis?
Do you utilize currency, issued by a government established by violence
and used to maintain an oppressive economic system?
Is your home completely solar-powered, or do you use natural gas, extracted
from the Earth, or electricity, made using dammed and bridled waters, or
huge polluting coal plants, or nuclear power plants?
Do you pay U.S. taxes, the bulk of which goes to support massive
spending on sophisticated killing systems?
Do you manage to always avoid transportation in a gas-fueled vehicle,
which not only pollutes but causes the plunder of coasts and natural
areas?
A few of you seem to be lining up to check others' ecofeminist credentials.
One of the great lessons we can learn from nature is that diversity and
change are the key to survival. Intolerance is a hallmark of totalitarianism.
Each of us has her own pace toward enlightenment. Relax and appreciate
our differences. We don't need to have identical views on eating meat
in order to change the status quo.
Jane Sooby
Ag Tech II (Sustainable Ag)
High Plains Ag Lab
3257 Rd. 109
Sidney, NE 69162-3129
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Jan 9 15:05:43 1996
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 96 17:04 EST
From: "D. Clayton 'LuvDoug' Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Meat and Masculinity!
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In-Reply-To: rttwin AT essex.ac.uk -- Mon, 8 Jan 1996 10:36:38 GMT
In his article yesterday on the relationship between meat and masculine
identities, Richard Twine posed the following questions:
1. "Why are more women vegetarian/vegan?"
2. "Why do men find giving up meat so much more difficult?"
Twine then went ahead to state that "some families/relationships are prevented
from going veggie because of a man's insistence on meat."
These statements piqued my curiosity because they presuppose so much. I
did not necessarily agree that women were more vegetarian than men or that
men for some biological or cultural reason were predisposed against "going
veggie" so I decided to examine these statements using United States survey
data.
In 1993 the National Opinion Research Center included a number of
environmental questions on their annual General Social Survey (or GSS). The
GSS provides social scientists with the responses of a nationally
representative sample of the noninstitutionalized, English speaking population
over 18 years of age.
The question of interest on this survey was:
How often do you refuse to eat meat for moral or environmental reasons?
The responses to this question were coded into four categories: Never,
Sometimes, Often, Always.
To examine the hypothesis that more women are vegetarian than men (Twine's
first question), I had the computer develop the following table based on
the 1993:
Sex
Male Female Row Total
Never 75.2% 65.3% 69.7%
Sometimes 18.8% 22.8% 21.1%
Often 4.9% 8.5% 6.9%
Always 1.1% 3.3% 2.3%
------------------------------------------
Column Total 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%
Sample Size 451 men 574 women 1025 people
------------------------------------------------------------------
From this table, we can see several things. First a majority
of the American public (69.7%) have never refused meat for moral
or environmental reasons. Second, and more important to the case
is that it does appear that women are slightly more likely to
refuse to eat meat than men; however, this difference is very
small (1.1% for men compared to 3.3% for women).
My conclusion is from this data is that the question "Why are
more women vegetarian/vegan?" overstates the real world situation.
One can emphasize that "on the average" a woman is more likely to be
vegetarian, but it is probably better to point out that the
distribution of men's and women's responses to the
vegetarian question are very similar (at least in the US). There are
still quite a few men (about 25%) that are more vegetarian than the
majority of American women (about 65% that never refuse meat). I
would be very cautious in making generalizations based solely "on the
average".
I also tried to examine Twine's second statement about the cause
of vegetarianism. Twine chalks the difference up to the role of meat
in masculine identity. In this space, the argument is pretty sound
and considering that the GSS has no questions on the role of meat in
masculine identity, I cannot examine this hypothesis; however, I can
attempt to provide other possible "causes" for vegitarianism.
I'll not attempt to go over regression analysis in this note.
If you're interested in what I did please write me back. Anyway, I
examined the following concepts to see if they were statistically
related to the vegitarian question:
Age
Gender
Education
White/Non-white
Number of Preteen Children in House
Family Income
Size of Community
Hours of TV watched a day
How often the respondent watched TV news
How often the respondent watched Public TV
Feminism - the GSS has several questions about women's
roles in the household, in the workplace, and concerning
children. I made a scale of these seven questions which I
then examined in relation to the vegitarian question. If
anyone is interested in the exact wording I will be happy
to post/send them.
What I found was that, controlling for each other using regression,
most of these
variables had no statistically significant relationship. The four
variables that did show a significant relationship were education,
gender, race(white/nonwhite) and the amount of public TV watched.
The strongest relationship, CONTROLLING FOR THE OTHER VARIABLES, was
between race, whether one was white or nonwhite and vegetarianism.
This means that nonwhite were more likely to be vegetarians in the
US, when gender, education and the amount of public television are
held equal. I must also say that while these four variables were
related to vegetarianism that they together explained just a small bit
about people responses statistically (In more statistical lingo, they
explained only about 7% of the variance in the vegetarian question).
These results leave plenty of room for other explanations or better/
more diverse questions. But they also provide alternative explanations
for why people are vegetarian.
Just two cents worth of reality check,
D. Smith, Dept. of Sociology, Penn State University
