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Choosing what to eat is rarely just a matter of taste. Thanks to unprecedented availability and choice, dinner has become a deeply moral concern, imbued with guilt, class connotations, politics and fear. To psychologists, this is a goldmine.
Coupled with a publishing trend of high-minded polemics against the industrialized food chain, all this makes for a rare opportunity to study how people discover new ethical principles, hold them firmly for a little while, and then abandon them.
Well-argued books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma might feel “life changing,” according to a paper in the current Frontiers in Psychology. But people who went vegetarian and organic after reading it tended to get back on the burgers and junk food within a year.
That fleeting flirtation with strict virtue was the main finding of a study of university students assigned to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a 2006 book that inspired many to change their dietary habits.
As the authors put it with coy understatement: “Attitude change dissipated somewhat with time…”
Read more here.
Coupled with a publishing trend of high-minded polemics against the industrialized food chain, all this makes for a rare opportunity to study how people discover new ethical principles, hold them firmly for a little while, and then abandon them.
Well-argued books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma might feel “life changing,” according to a paper in the current Frontiers in Psychology. But people who went vegetarian and organic after reading it tended to get back on the burgers and junk food within a year.
That fleeting flirtation with strict virtue was the main finding of a study of university students assigned to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a 2006 book that inspired many to change their dietary habits.
As the authors put it with coy understatement: “Attitude change dissipated somewhat with time…”
Read more here.
