Why We Trust the Hand That Slices Our Lunch, Even When It Makes Us Sick

The deli counter wins, every time. Put a tray of meat sliced by a person in a grocery store next to a vacuum-sealed packet off a factory line, and shoppers reach for the human version. They rate it tastier. Fresher. Somehow more honest. And almost none of them are thinking about listeria.

That gap between what feels safe and what is safe sits at the heart of a new study from a team of hospitality researchers in the United States. They have a name for the instinct driving it: the handmade food halo.

The logic, if you can call it that, runs something like this. A human touched it, so a human cared about it, so it must be good. The halo is a cognitive shortcut in which our warm feelings about human involvement leak onto every other judgement we make about a product, including the one judgement where human hands are arguably the problem. Because hands carry things. Bacteria, mostly. Hand-sliced deli meat has been tied to a disproportionate share of listeriosis outbreaks, and the more a piece of food is handled, the more chances something nasty gets a foothold.

So the researchers set out to break the spell. Surely, they reasoned, you just tell people the risk and watch the preference flip.

The Spell Does Not Break the Way You Think

Across two online experiments, 344 US consumers looked at deli meat, rated how appealing it was and how likely they were to buy it, then read a note explaining that, per the science, counter-sliced meat carries substantially higher listeriosis risk than the prepackaged stuff. Then they rated everything again. The work, led by Zixi (Lavi) Peng of the University of Massachusetts Amherst alongside colleagues at Penn State and the University of Houston, was published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management.

“We noticed that consumers generally prefer handmade food or hand-sliced deli meat and automatically assume that it is more cared for, more authentic and has better quality,” Peng says. “But from a food-safety perspective, hand preparation doesn’t always mean the food is better.”

Here is the bit that threw them. The safety warning did dent enthusiasm for the hand-sliced meat, knocked it down a peg, exactly as you would predict. What it did not do was make the safer packaged option look any better. People came away cooler on the risky choice without warming to the sensible one, as though the warning had simply soured the whole transaction rather than redirecting it, which is not at all how a tidy public-health campaign is supposed to work. “We thought that once we told participants that the hand-sliced deli meat might be risky, they would automatically perceive the safer option as more attractive,” Peng explains. “But that’s not the case. The appeal of the prepackaged option didn’t increase.”

What Shoppers Actually Want Is Not a Hand

The second experiment is where it gets clever. This time the team redesigned the packaged product, dressing it with the trappings of human care: a farmer’s face, language about careful preparation. Same factory product underneath, different costume. And after the safety information landed, this dressed-up package outperformed both the plain packet and the hand-sliced meat on appeal and willingness to buy. The effect ran through perceived attractiveness, the sense that someone, somewhere, gave a damn.

Which points to something a little unflattering about all of us. We were never really after the human hand. We were after the feeling the hand stands in for, care, attention, authenticity, and that feeling turns out to be remarkably easy to print on a label.

There is a catch worth naming. These were online surveys, people clicking through images rather than queuing at a real counter with a real craving, and the study leans on deli meat specifically because its risks are so well documented. Whether the same halo glows as brightly over a tray of supermarket sushi or a street-food stall is, for now, an open question, though the researchers reckon it probably does.

Still, the practical lesson is sharp, and it cuts against decades of food-safety messaging built on the faith that information alone changes behaviour. It mostly doesn’t. We buy lunch in seconds, on a feeling, not after a literature review. “Consumers are unlikely to research every product before making a quick purchase,” Peng says. “That means safety information needs to be visible at the point of sale, but marketers also need to make the safer option feel appealing, trustworthy and cared for.” Roughly 1 in 6 Americans catches a foodborne illness each year, at a national cost north of seventy billion dollars, so the stakes behind a shopper’s two-second glance are not trivial.

The uncomfortable upshot is that protecting people may mean manufacturing the very warmth that misled them in the first place, borrowing the language of the handmade to sell the safety of the machine. The halo, it seems, is not going anywhere. The trick is learning to point it at the right shelf.

DOI / Source: 10.1016/j.ijhm.2026.104770

Frequently Asked Questions

Is hand-sliced deli meat really riskier than the prepackaged kind?

According to the research the study draws on, yes: meat sliced at a deli counter is associated with substantially higher listeriosis risk than prepackaged deli meat, partly because every extra bit of handling is another opportunity for contamination. That runs directly counter to most shoppers’ instincts, which is exactly why the researchers find it worth studying.

What is the handmade food halo?

It is a cognitive bias in which positive feelings about human involvement spill over onto unrelated judgements, so we assume a hand-prepared food is fresher, higher quality and safer simply because a person made it. The trouble is that human handling can be the source of the very risk we are overlooking.

Why doesn’t telling people the risk fix the problem?

In the experiments, a safety warning lowered enthusiasm for the risky hand-sliced option but did not make the safer packaged product any more appealing. Knowledge alone redirected nobody, which suggests public-health messaging needs to make the safe choice feel desirable, not just inform people that the other one is dangerous.

Could this apply to foods beyond deli meat?

The researchers focused on deli meat because its safety risks are so well documented, but they suspect the same halo shapes how we judge other ready-to-eat foods such as sushi and street foods. For now that is an informed hunch rather than a tested finding.