Vegetarian Singles vs. BBQ Singles

Are you having trouble looking for dates with high I.Q.s and great bodies? Well, all you have to do is a search on your favorite online dating site for the word "vegetarian." Yup, that's it, one simple search for vegetarian singles and you easily narrow down the gene pool to the hottest and brightest. What's that? You think I'm full of crap? Well ok, this might be a little controversial but hear me out and let me tell you about my not so scientific research.

So there I was poking around my favorite free online dating site, PlentyofFish.com, when I stumble upon a little known component of the Plenty of Fish dating site. Buried in it's advertising section is a page in which you get a demographic breakdown of members based on the interests listed in peoples dating profiles. Yea I know, if you're a stats junkie like me this is a pretty sweet find.

Naturally, my curiosity got the best of me and I started plugging stuff in. For some reason the word "zombies" popped into my head and figured that was as good a place to start my search as any. This search brings up a whole statistical breakdown from gender, income ranges, education, marital status, height, body type and even drinking ability.

So lets see, people who are interested in zombies are mostly: males, making less than $25,000 a year, are big and tall/BBW, and drink more than 3 times a week. Awesome!

You might imagine how much fun you could have with this thing just plugging in random weird crap. For instance, did you know that people interested in necrophilia have a 300% divorce rate? Who would have thought that?!

Despite my juvenile usage of this neat Internet tool, I decided to put my mind to better use.

Recently I had an argument with a friend of mine which I declared that the overall population of vegetarian females was hotter than the overall population of omnivores. It was a heated debate and my friend being anti-vegetarian for some reason refused to believe my theory. In addition, I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how vegetarian dating should be one of the categories in which to filter potential dates by.

However, now I have a chance to somewhat prove my point. I did searches with the Plenty of Fish demographic tool for interests involving the words vegetarian and barbecue. I figured people don't write "omnivore" or "carnivore" in their interests section so I had to go with a more round about word, thinking that a majority of people who like "barbecue" are big meat eaters.

I plugged all the data from my searches into a nifty spreadsheet, made some graphs and this is what I got:

So as I suspected, a large majority of vegetarians are female, which shouldn't be much of surprise to anyone. Of course, men are all about the BBBQ's. For those Simpsons fans out there, you know what the extra "B" stands for.

The education level is certainly interesting, showing more vegetarians with higher levels of education. I'm not sure if this means that smart people are deciding to take better care of their bodies or whether eating a vegetarian diet makes you smarter. Either way there seems to be some correlation there.

Of course this was the graph I was most interested in. You see, I'm a bit of a drinker myself and it's important to me that I can drag my female dates out to my favorite watering holes with me. Even when I'm browsing chicks on the Plenty of Fish site, I tend to filter by drinking habits... is that wrong? Anyways, I'm a little disappointed to see that a large majority of the vegetarians on the site don't drink at all. Is there such a thing as being too healthy? Although, I suppose you could always use your date as a designated driver...

Last but not least, the characteristic that I'm sure most guys filter in their online dating searches is body type. Come on now, don't lie fellas, we know what's up. According to this chart, if you like thin, then you'll love dating vegetarian singles.

So there's your Online Dating Stats 101 course for the day.  That is all.

Vegetarian Dating Options?

It just occurred to me that Plenty of Fish doesn't has an option to categorize oneself as a vegan or vegetarian. There are plenty of other things to categorize oneself by like religion, body type, preference for children, your drinking/smoking habits and even if you have a car or not. All of these very clear lifestyle choices that one would certainly consider when looking for a potential relationship. Yet the one thing that isn't categorized is a person's eating habits.

Now maybe it's just me and I live in a large liberal city, Boston, with tons of mostly liberal college students with a pretty good chunk of them, from my observation, being vegetarians or vegans. I'm not sure why I'm relating liberalism with the propensity towards vegetarianism but it seems to be the case. Anyways, from this growing trend I think that it is apparent that more and more people will want to date and be in relationships with people of similar eating habits.

It makes sense to filter dates in this manner, particularly when on large dating sites like PlentyofFish.

For example, the last girl I dated was a vegetarian. Though I tend to lean towards a mostly vegetarian diet, I'm still an omnivore and consume meat on an occasional basis. This got pretty tricky when we'd go out to eat on dates. Sometimes I would forget that she was a vegetarian and take her to places with little options for that kind of diet... oopps! Luckily for me, she was pretty easy going with having to deal with restaurants filled with voracious carnivores, but I have heard some stories where the omnivore/vegan dates really butt heads.

There was a good New York Times article last year called, "I Love You, but You Love Meat," which nicely illustrated the potential dating conflicts that meat eaters and vegans can have.

"...many vegetarians say they cannot date anyone who eats meat. Vegans, who avoid eating not just animals but animal-derived products, take it further, shivering at the thought of kissing someone who has even sipped honey-sweetened tea."

Sometimes it probably goes a little too far but I certainly don't blame people for only wanting to date others with the same eating habits. After all, eating is a pretty big part of our lives, it ranks way up there on the needs scale, right next to stuff like... breathing. When you're eating three times a day, at least one of those meals is probably with your spouse, doesn't it make sense that the two should be on the same page diet wise?

As far as online dating sites go, there's one for every niche out there. Of course, this certainly means that there are vegetarian and vegan dating sites to cater to this crowd. Take the site VeggieDate for example which caters to people with all kinds of variations in veggie like diets from lacto ovo vegetarians, vegans and even macrobiotic diets... whatever that is.

So here's my thing, with the rise of preferences for a certain dietary lifestyle in a relationship, shouldn't this be a category choice added to the mainstream online dating sites like Plenty of Fish? Isn't one's choice in food just as important a quality in a date as their drinking habits? Perhaps I'm nitpicking a bit but I think I just might be on to something here.

A quick search in the PlentyofFish forums with the word "vegetarian" brings up a crap load of threads, over thirty, all with the same heated debates about dating vegetarians, vegans and the like.

What do you guys and gals think? How does ones dietary choice affect your online dating habits?