"Plant-based diets not seen as masculine"

Men are more reluctant than women to move to a plant-based diet due to social norms, according to a panel.

Speaking at Food Matters Live, at the ExCel London, on promoting healthier diets among British shoppers, Daniel Vennard, director of the Better Buying Lab, said that meat consumption was still seen as a masculine trait, making it harder for men to up their veg intake.

Vennard said: “There are three key factors that influence what consumers choose. Firstly there are needs and wants, and how that product meets those need and wants.

“There’s the media environment, and how catchy and memorably that advertising is, and the shopping environment: how physically available products are and how well they are displayed and the quality of that display.

“The third element is socio-cultural norms. How will the people around them perceive what they put in their basket? For example men are reluctant to pick up plant-based diets because they see themselves, and by women, to be less masculine, so this weird cultural norm exists around plant-based foods.

“If you are to really shift diets, yes you need to drive education and tweak consumer needs. But really you need a much more successful broad-based set of interventions, to change the environment but also fundamental socio-cultural norms.”

Vennard said men’s consumption of meat has also remained static while women’s has gone down.

Business consultant and food anthropologist Katrina Kollegaeva, said associations with food were cultural and could be changed.

“There’s this assumption that men tend to want to meat and women want to have veg, but I remember one study that for many Greeks, eating beef was actually associated with health, for both men and women.”