Children’s knowledge of and attitudes toward animal-based foods.

• In Event: The development of speciesism: Children’s and adolescents’ moral cognition regarding animals and the natural world

Abstract

The complexity of the human-animal relationship is perhaps most apparent in the widespread behavior of meat-eating. Most people endorse the compassionate treatment of animals. At the same time, however, the majority of adults worldwide are implicated in the suffering of animals because they eat animal-based foods and also feed them to children. There are various reasons to believe that children may consume animal products without understanding that they come from animals. Industrialized farming has physically distanced consumers from food production. Parents may further obfuscate the matter by intentionally withholding information from their children about the food on their plate (Bray et al., 2016; Cairns & Johnston, 2018). Even when children seem to grasp the link between animals and food, they may not fully understand that animals are intentionally harmed for meat production (Brophy et al., 2003). The purpose of this research was to assess (1) children’s knowledge of animals as a food source, and (2) their sense of how acceptable it is to eat animals.
We recruited a diverse sample of 176 American children between the ages of 4-5 years (younger age group), and 6-7 years (older age group). Each child participated in two counterbalanced card sorting tasks. In the food origin sorting task, children categorized color images of familiar foods (e.g., cheese, chicken nuggets, French fries) as either coming from a plant or an animal. We predicted that in this task children would incorrectly sort animal-based foods as coming from plants. In the edibility sorting task, children sorted color images of items (e.g., chicken, dog, tomato) into two categories indicating whether or not they were okay to eat. We hypothesized that children would classify animals as not okay to eat, including animals that are common food sources, such as cows and pigs.
The analyses focused on children’s errors in each task. In the food origin sorting task, a sizeable minority of children claimed that meat products, including hamburgers, hotdogs, bacon, and chicken nuggets came from plants. As shown in Figure 1, children’s performance in this task was characterized by a significant interaction, F(2, 348) = 3.723, p = .025, η2p = .021. Younger children made more errors than older children when classifying meats and non-meat animal foods, but no age difference was found for plant-foods. In the edibility sorting task, the most frequently missorted items were food source animals (i.e., chicken, cow, fish, pig). Figure 2 shows the significant interaction, F(2, 348) = 3.090, p = .047, ηp2 = .017, indicating that children’s errors on the two types of animals (food source, non-food source) decreased with age, but that errors on non-animal targets were comparably low for both age groups.
The results suggest that children in our sample, particularly those under the age of 6 years, lack a full understanding that common foods they eat regularly come from animals. Children’s behavior may, therefore, be in conflict with their values. The results have implications not only for the development of the human-animal relationship, but also for the climate crisis.

Author

• Erin R Hahn, Furman University
  Presenting Author