Why Meat Still Holds Power in China
People like to imagine their food choices are personal. Rational. Independent. They are not.
Most people eat what feels normal. What feels familiar. What feels socially safe. They look sideways before they look inward. They take their cues from family, friends, trends, restaurant menus, online comments, and whatever the culture has already dressed up as ordinary. That matters, because if meat consumption is socially manufactured, it can also be socially dismantled.
A recent study by Toritseju Begho and Shuainan Liu, published in the International Journal of Food Science and Technology, offers a useful glimpse into that machinery. Through four experiments involving 483 adults in China, the researchers tested how people responded to plant-based meat when it was framed as popular, positively discussed, attractively reviewed, or positioned as the default option.
The findings are revealing. Not because they show people carefully weighing evidence and making principled decisions. They do not. They show something much more familiar: people follow the crowd, absorb the mood around them, and respond strongly to what appears accepted.
That should not surprise anyone. Meat has never been just food. It has always been social permission made edible.
The power of “everyone else is doing it”
In the first experiment, participants were split into two groups. One was told that three out of ten Chinese consumers would choose plant-based meat. The other was told that seven out of ten would choose it. That was enough to create a sharp difference. Only 41% of people in the first group said they would buy it, compared with 68% in the second.
Nothing about the product changed. No one suddenly discovered a new nutritional fact. No one tasted anything. The only thing that shifted was the perceived social norm.
That is the point.
People often defend meat consumption as if it were the product of deep personal conviction, but much of it is imitation with a knife and fork. When a food looks fringe, people hesitate. When it looks normal, they relax. The moral seriousness of using animals rarely enters the equation at all. What enters is comfort. Belonging. The fear of being the odd one out.
This matters beyond plant-based meat. It tells us that public behaviour is not fixed because people have reached some settled ethical truth. It is fixed because norms repeat themselves until they feel like nature.
Social media does not just reflect opinion. It manufactures it.
The second study moved into social media territory. Participants were shown simulated comments about plant-based meat. One group saw positive comments linked to environmental, health, and animal-related concerns. The other saw negative comments. The positive comments also had stronger engagement, which is exactly how social proof tends to work online: an opinion does not just appear, it arrives already endorsed.
Again, the results were significant. People who saw positive comments were more inclined to buy plant-based meat. People who saw negative comments drifted towards hesitation.
That is how flimsy “preference” often is. It can be nudged by the tone of a comment section.
This should be obvious by now, yet people still talk about consumer choices as though they emerge in a vacuum. They do not. They are socially rehearsed. If enough people publicly perform approval, others read that approval as evidence. If enough people mock or dismiss something, hesitation multiplies.
That same mechanism has been working in favour of meat for generations. Most people do not grow up interrogating the use of animals. They grow up surrounded by approval. Family meals, adverts, packaging, school lunches, restaurant menus, jokes, habits, celebrations. The social script is already written before they can read it.
The study is useful because it shows that script can be tampered with. Not by force. Not by banning choice. By making a different choice look legitimate.
Framing changes behaviour, even when the facts barely change
The third experiment may be the most revealing of all. Participants were shown a discounted plant-based menu, but the information was framed differently. One group was told that 90% of customer feedback was positive. The other was told that 10% of customer feedback was negative.
These statements describe the same reality. Yet they did not land the same way.
Around 60% of the people who saw the positively framed version were very likely or extremely likely to try it. In the negatively framed version, hesitation dominated. Even the discount could not rescue it.
This is what culture does to moral questions. It strips them down until they are managed as branding problems. Say it the right way, place it in the right context, pair it with enough reassurance, and people move. Phrase the exact same situation in a way that activates doubt, and they retreat.
That may sound cynical, but it is better understood as evidence of how unstable public habits really are. The attachment to meat is often portrayed as deep, ancient, biological, inevitable. Yet here people were being shifted by wording.
That should puncture a lot of inflated claims about how impossible dietary change is. No, a sentence will not abolish the use of animals. But when a behaviour depends so heavily on approval, familiarity, and framing, it is clearly not some immovable fact of human nature either.
The default matters, but meat still carries status
The fourth study tested what happened when participants were served a plant-based option by default and then given the chance to switch to meat for a fee of RMB5. Roughly 45% said they would pay extra to switch to meat. Around 33% said they would stay with the plant-based option. The rest were unsure.
This is where the study stops being comforting.
Yes, defaults can work. Yes, some people will accept the plant-based option when it is simply placed in front of them. But nearly half were willing to pay more for meat even when the dishes looked the same.
That tells us something ugly but familiar. Meat is not just being bought as flavour. It is being bought as reassurance, status, identity, habit, and perceived value. It still carries a kind of prestige. To many people, meat feels more real, more proper, more trustworthy, more worth paying for.
Again, this is not unique to China. The study was conducted in China, but the underlying pattern is global. In different cultures the details shift, but the basic logic stays the same. Meat is treated as standard. Plant-based alternatives are treated as the variation, the compromise, the curiosity, the thing that must justify itself.
That is why simply making alternatives available is not enough. Availability does not erase hierarchy. You can place something on the menu without dislodging the belief that animal flesh is the serious option.
What this study really shows
The most important thing here is not that marketers have found new tricks. It is that the normality of meat is far more fragile than it looks.
If people’s willingness to try plant-based meat rises because they think other people approve of it, then much of meat’s grip comes from collective performance. If positive comments shift intention, then public sentiment matters. If framing alters behaviour, then so-called preference is often just perception under pressure. If a third of people stick with a plant-based default, then meat is not as non-negotiable as its defenders pretend.
But the study also shows the limit of shallow interventions. People may respond to nudges, yet many still cling to meat because the broader culture has taught them that it means something. Safety. satisfaction. normality. identity. That is where the harder work begins.
The use of animals is not upheld by hunger. It is upheld by a worldview in which other beings are commodities, meals, ingredients, outputs, and tools for human preference. That worldview can dress itself up as tradition or convenience or choice, but at its core it is still supremacy. It is still the assumption that the desires of one group justify the use of another.
Plant-based meat does not solve that on its own. A burger made from peas instead of a cow does not automatically produce justice. But studies like this are valuable because they expose the scaffolding. They show how people are moved, what they respond to, and how much of what passes for personal choice is actually social obedience.
That should embolden anyone trying to change food systems.
People are not attached to meat because they have calmly studied the ethics and reached a defensible conclusion. They are attached to what has been normalised around them. That means the task is not just to offer alternatives. It is to challenge what counts as normal in the first place.
Because once a behaviour depends this heavily on approval, repetition, framing, and cues from the crowd, it stops looking like destiny.
It starts looking like conditioning.
And conditioning can be broken.