What is a flexitarian? Seriously.
Because apparently you can eat animals every day and be one. You can eat animals more often than the average person and be one. You can even eat animals 36 times a week and, according to at least one study, still somehow be a flexitarian. At which point I have a revolutionary suggestion. Maybe you’re just someone who eats animals.
A new review published in Appetite looked at how researchers have actually been using the term “flexitarian”, and found something rather important: nobody seems to know it means.
There is no commonly agreed definition. Researchers use different thresholds, different questions and different methods for deciding who qualifies. Consequently, estimates of how many people are flexitarian have ranged from 11% to 66%. One German study managed to classify more than three quarters of its sample as flexitarian. That should probably be our first clue that we’re measuring something fairly meaningless.
Vegetarian, but with animals?
The word seems to have started with something resembling an actual definition. In 2003, the American Dialect Society described a flexitarian as a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat. Merriam-Webster later defined one as somebody whose normally meat-free diet occasionally includes meat or fish. Oxford went with someone following a primarily, but not strictly, vegetarian diet. Already, that’s a contradiction. If you eat animals, you’re not vegetarian. But somehow the definition has become even less useful since.
Scientific literature increasingly treats flexitarians not as almost-vegetarians, but simply as people who eat animals and perhaps eat slightly fewer of them. One definition described flexitarianism as reducing meat consumption to recommended levels. That could still include eating animals every single day. Another proposed flexitarian diet allowed red meat once a week and white meat half a portion a day.
So we’ve gone from “vegetarian who occasionally eats animals” to “person who regularly eats animals, but perhaps not quite as many as someone else”.
Why does that need a name?
Apparently one meat-free meal is enough
It gets sillier.
Some studies have classified people as flexitarian if they exclude meat from just one meal a week. Others require one day. Others don’t specify any reduction at all, merely that somebody says they’re trying to eat less. Think about that.
You could eat animals for breakfast, lunch and dinner 6 days a week, skip the bacon at breakfast on Sunday and potentially qualify. Some research doesn’t even require your behaviour to have changed. Expressing a willingness to reduce consumption can be enough. And when people simply identify themselves as flexitarian, things don’t become clearer.
In one study, 8% of self-described flexitarians ate meat daily. A Danish report found that 75% didn’t meet a stricter definition of eating a mainly plant-based diet, while almost a third didn’t even manage one meat-free day each week.
The baseline is the problem
This is perhaps the most revealing thing about “flexitarianism”. In cultures where eating animals frequently is treated as completely normal, simply eating them less often can look radical enough to deserve an identity. Animal flesh doesn’t need to be the centrepiece of every meal. Reducing consumption is obviously preferable to increasing it. Someone eating animals once a week is responsible for less demand than the same person eating them 3 times a day.
But “less” is a quantity.
It isn’t an ethical position.
We don’t need a special identity for everybody somewhere between maximum consumption and abstention.
If I drive less, I’m not a flexi-cyclist.
If I smoke fewer cigarettes, I’m not a flexi-non-smoker.
And if I eat animals slightly less often, I’m still eating animals.
The label may actually hide how little is changing
This isn’t just pedantry.
The researchers warn that casting enormous numbers of people as flexitarian can create an exaggerated impression that a major dietary transition is already happening.
Often, only a minority of the people classified as flexitarian actually eat animals significantly less frequently than average. The review notes that projections show little evidence of dramatic reductions in meat consumption across wealthy countries without political intervention.
Calling somebody a flexitarian because they’d quite like to cut down can therefore transform intention into apparent progress.
That’s convenient.
Look how many flexitarians there are!
Look how rapidly things are changing!
Except some of those “flexitarians” are eating animals every day.
Some are eating more than average.
Some haven’t reduced their consumption at all.
The researchers themselves conclude there is little convincing evidence that flexitarians constitute a distinct consumer group comparable with vegetarians. The category has such enormous internal variation that researchers have even resorted to creating “light”, “medium” and “heavy” flexitarians. Maybe that’s because the category doesn’t really exist.
So by all means eat fewer animals.
Better yet, stop eating them.
But can we please stop pretending that occasionally ordering the beans instead of the chicken constitutes an entirely new category? You’re not flexitarian. You’re someone who still eats animals.