Chicken vs. Steak

BASED ON GENDER

Background Research

     We further conducted our research by using the search engine Google to find more studies on our topic. We entered the keywords “Is there a relationship between a preference in chicken or steak based on gender” and 196,000 results came up. The first website we visited was a food blog on http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/616405 titled, "Does one's gender affect food preferences?"

     This blog question not only addressed preference in meat, but also preference in alcoholic beverages and spicy food. The blog suggests that women prefer chicken and fish more than men do, but they are curious as to whether or not this is a biological factor rather than trying to look feminine or masculine. This topic was obviously very popular because there were 38 replies to the blog. Some women replied stating that they do not agree with this blog. They eat meat all of the time, but they tend to not eat as much. Many believe that it has nothing to do with the meat, but the portion. And others believed that women tend to order chicken or a lighter meal at a restaurant because they don’t want to feel manly eating a slab of ribs.

      We were able to continue our research because one blogger provided a website link about a study done on this topic. This link sent us to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/03/19/AR200803101724.html with an article titled, “The Gender Divide Starts Over Dinner.” These researches also thought that women prefer leaner meats while men like hunks of steak or beef. This study was led by Beletshachew Shiferaw. “His team collected data on 15,000 American adults who participated in the Foodborne Disease Active Surveillance Network survey, which ran from May 2006 to April 2007. Participants were queried on the various foods they had eaten over the past seven days.” Their results showed that men are more likely to eat a wide variety of meat such as poultry, veal, and game. It also found that women are more likely to eat more vegetables. However, men ate asparagus and Brussels sprouts more than women.

       Overall, we found all of these websites very helpful and interesting. However, these studies focused on different factors such as women preferring vegetables over men. So, we can hypothesize that men will be more likely to eat meat, but not that women are more likely to eat chicken.