Who Wants What on their Plate?

Norwegians would rather eat whale meat than kangaroo meat. In Australia, it's the other way round. This is one of the less surprising conclusions of a survey on people's attitudes to eating the meat of various animals, carried out in six different countries.

The survey shows that in modern industrial societies there are, in general, many taboos connected to the consumption of wild animals, whether it be deer, seal or wild birds. In countries where it is not traditional to eat marine mammals, whale and seal meat comes out worst.

Whichever way you look at it, it would seem that not many people would like to stick their forks into certain domestic animals with special status, like horses. In Australia people prefer kangaroos to horses. Chicken, on the other hand, is eaten with a good appetite, but here, too, we find national variations. In the USA, only 5,8% don't eat chicken, in Germany the figure is 16,4%.

The figures below show the percentages of people who could not think of eating the meat of the various animals shown:

           Germany       USA       Australia      Norway

Wild birds     78,1      38,2      48,8           32,2
Whale          79,1      87,7      93,1           38,5
Seal           86,6      87,8      89,0           44,2
Chickens       16,4       5,8       8,5            6,5
Horses         60,2      80,6      72,3           51,4
Kangaroos      64,1      79,6      47,7           55,2

(Survey carried out by the Canadian Circumpolar Institute and Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies)