8/8/2021 How Do You Convince People to Eat Less Meat?

| The New Republic

How Do You Convince People to

Eat Less Meat?
A recent fracas in Spain shows that simply telling people to reduce meat consumption
in the name of climate and personal health won’t work.

ILLUSTRATION BY MELANIE LAMBRICK

Jan Dutkiewicz / July 28, 2021

In early July, Spain’s minister of consumer affairs, Alberto Garzón, posted a short
video on Twitter urging Spaniards to decrease their meat consumption. From a
political communication perspective, it was flawless. He listed the many ways
large-scale meat production and consumption harm humans, the environment,
and animals, all backed by peer-reviewed science. He focused on reducing meat
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barbecues. He acknowledged that changing diets is hard for those without access
to cheap, accessible, and diverse food choices. He explained that the government
would launch food education campaigns and implement regulations to
incentivize more sustainable diets. He even added a hashtag:
#MenosCarneMasVida (Less Meat More Life).

Spanish politics exploded. While Garzón’s nuanced, well-researched message

received some support (the number of Spaniards who claim to want to reduce
their meat consumption is rising), several fellow politicians turned to juvenile
trolling. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, of Spain’s socialist party, gushed about his
love of the chuletón steak to a press conference, and Teodoro García Egea of the
right-wing People’s Party tweeted out a picture of a grill packed with slabs of meat
with the caption, “To your health.”

The affair brilliantly displayed the fraught politics of dietary change. The average
Western diet—prevalent in Spain, just as it is in the United States and the United
Kingdom—is high in meat, fat, and sugar, its production and consumption an
environmental and public health disaster. This has been true for decades. But in
the past few years, a growing chorus of voices have begun to call for major dietary
changes in the interest of human and planetary health. The EAT-Lancet report
published in February 2019 called for a global shift to a primarily plant-based diet
if we are to keep agricultural production within planetary limits. The problem,
however, is that actually changing what people eat is extremely difficult. Who
should drive this change: individuals, governments, or corporations? Can a
balance be struck between consumer freedom and regulation? And how can
rational policymaking be squared with food’s significant cultural, nationalist, and
personal meaning?

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Steaks, in other words, are the SUVs of meat: expensive,

unnecessary, environmentally noxious status symbols
that do far more harm than good.
Beef is where this kind of discussion usually starts because it’s where the scientific
consensus is particularly strong. The world’s one billion cows contribute about 6
percent of all greenhouse gases through their methane-rich burps, require vast
amounts of grazing land, and are often fattened for slaughter on industrial
feedlots where they are fed a diet of monocrops like corn and soy, whose planting
in turn contributes to widespread deforestation and pesticide use.
Overconsumption of red meat has also been linked to a range of health issues.

Steaks, in other words, are the SUVs of meat: expensive, unnecessary,

environmentally noxious status symbols that do far more harm than good. There’s
a good case for eliminating beef consumption entirely, and drastically reducing it
ought to be a no-brainer: The EAT-Lancet model diet, for instance, suggests
limiting beef to 98 grams per week (and all meat to under 500 grams). That
amounts to a 60 percent decrease, relative to a Spaniard’s average diet, and a
massive 86 percent decrease in the USA.

The traditional way for NGOs, companies, and governments to approach dietary
change is through information campaigns and so-called nudges that don’t
impinge on individual choice or risk regulatory and legislative battles. They’re
nonintrusive ways of suggesting more healthy or ethical choices to consumers—
like releasing EAT-Lancet recommendations or national dietary guidelines,
slapping “fair trade” labels on coffee or “humanely raised” labels on meat. It can
also mean deciding not to promote a product, as the food website Epicurious did
when it vowed to stop running beef recipes for many of the reasons mentioned by
Garzón.

The problem with these interventions is that they are not all that effective. While
consumers may claim they want to make more informed or sustainable decisions,
they tend to default to their usual habits in the supermarket aisles. And
information doesn’t necessarily shift behavior; it may even have the opposite
effect. Psychologists argue that when consumers face the “meat paradox” of
eating meat while being opposed to the harms caused by it, they will often create
justificatory narratives and rationalizations that deny harm or personal
responsibility rather than actually halting meat consumption.
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These mild, less effective policy efforts also tend to be attacked by critics as if they
were actually reducing consumer choice. EAT-Lancet was met with a coordinated
online countercampaign under the hashtag #yes2meat. Epicurious was lambasted
by pro-beef critics, including foodies and food writers, in the wake of its decision.
When the United Nations tried to call for meat reduction to mitigate climate
change, it too was brutally critiqued, including by pro-meat climate scholars.

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Changing the scope and availability of choices in any given situation may be more
productive. This is called changing “choice architecture,” and there’s good
evidence for its efficacy. For instance, removing beef jerky from among the
impulse-buy items in a checkout line disincentivizes jerky purchases just by
moving them out of sight and out of mind. Major opportunities for choice-
architecture manipulation exist in supermarkets and restaurants, which could
commit to selling less beef, promoting more healthful options, or replacing meat
with alternative proteins, as a growing number of fast-food joints are doing.

These changes can have an even bigger impact in institutional spaces like schools
that have large provisioning budgets and feed large numbers of people; such
changes can shift both individuals’ habits and influence the economics of food
distribution. Studies have shown that simply increasing the number of vegetarian
options or making plant-based meals the default instead of meat massively
increases more sustainable eating. And shifting food patterns in schools can build
the next generation of more sustainable eaters.

But there’s stiff opposition here, too. When schools in Lyon, France, moved to
make lunches plant-forward (albeit with fish and egg and dairy options available),
farmers stormed the city in protest and the French minister of agriculture
clamored against anti-meat “ideology.” In the U.S., Joni Ernst, the infamously
meat-industry-friendly senator from Iowa whose campaign advertising included
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boasts about pig castration, has introduced an act to preemptively preclude

federal institutions from engaging in nudges like “Meatless Monday.”

That brings us to state intervention. Government has tremendous power to

address collective action problems through incentives, regulations, and taxation.
In the world of public health, these interventions are ranked on a scale called the
Nuffield Ladder, with gentle nudges at the bottom and outright bans at the top.
One of the most commonly used tools is taxation. In particular, governments can
implement what are known as Pigouvian taxes on things like sugary drinks,
tobacco, or polluting factories—the idea is to force producers to cover the cost of
the harms their products do. They can also slap so-called “sin taxes” on products
to increase direct costs for consumers. These taxes work. Numerous studies show
that these are very effective in decreasing consumption, leading groups like the
World Health Organization to strongly support them. The academic case for such
taxes on meat is robust and convincing. But taxes in general are massively
politically unpopular and lead to accusations of a nanny state interfering in
consumers’ free choice, as the battles over sugar taxes around the world have
shown.

On July 15, the U.K. released its Food Strategy, a well-researched document urging
a reshaping of the British food system in the interest of health and sustainability.
It called for reductions in sugar, salt, and meat. But the authors only suggested a
tax on sugar and salt, shying away from a “politically impossible” meat tax.
Instead, they recommended plant-forward dietary nudges and subsidies for the
development of alternative proteins.

It’s a good illustration of the way policymakers often self-edit when it comes to
such a fraught topic. The problem is that, while this approach is politically
pragmatic, it is naïve to expect that clinging to the lower rungs of the Nuffield
Ladder can lead to even the Food Strategy’s suggested 30 percent reduction in
meat consumption, let alone the EAT-Lancet standard.

But the problem isn’t only that policymakers are wary of inviting pro-meat
backlash. It’s also that virtually all governments subsidize and promote meat
production and consumption. The EU, despite its Green Deal commitment to
carbon neutrality by 2050, has spent millions of Euros on a “Beefatarian”
advertising campaign, and both Europe and the USA support animal agriculture
through extensive subsidies and supports. Changing this dynamic—a status quo
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meat industry is baked into countless national budgets—will require a

multifaceted approach.

Incentivizing the production of alternatives in addition to, or ideally instead of,

harmful products like beef, as the U.K. Food Strategy does with its support for
alternative proteins, is one good option. But such support should include not only
plant-based or cell-based “meat alternatives” but also plants as alternatives to
meat. A recent study published in Global Food Security, for instance, shows that
humble legumes, with the right government push, could provide a far more
sustainable and diverse source of protein than meat. Creating opportunities for
food access is also crucial, including quite simply pushing for higher incomes,
through policies like minimum wage laws to allow consumers a greater range of
options and creating more robust nutritional assistance programs. An EAT-
Lancet-compliant diet, for instance, is readily within financial reach for most
people in the global north but far too expensive for over a billion people
worldwide.

Extensive research shows that humans, by virtue of

being social animals, are influenced both by others’
action and by a desire for sociability itself.
Usually when collective-action problems are discussed, a crude dichotomy
emerges between individual action and policy. Many commentators suggest that
individual action is effectively meaningless and collective action is where all
political efforts should be directed. (After all, what does it matter if I eat a burger
or chuletón now and then, when what matters is challenging the meat industry
and the political-economic structures that enable it?) But with food—intensely
personal, with individuals voting with their forks multiple times per day—
individual change is worth revisiting. It may matter little in the aggregate if any
one individual changes their diet, much as it matters little in the greater scheme
of things if they drive an SUV or vote in elections. But changes to individual
actions taken together can play two important roles. The first is norm change.

Extensive research shows that humans, by virtue of being social animals, are
influenced both by others’ action and by a desire for sociability itself. An
influential article in the journal Science on the topic specifically uses diet as an
example, arguing that “if a less meat-intensive diet became the norm, individuals
might conform partly owing to social pressure or a wish to be environmentally
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friendly; but a primary motive may simply be to enjoy pleasant and convenient
joint meals.”

Changes in norms and demand, in turn, can send market signals to retailers and
producers about what sorts of products consumers want, which in turn can
reinforce norms. For instance, demand for beef-like burgers like the Beyond
Burger tells retailers and restaurants that they should stock the burger, which they
then promote, inadvertently creating a nudge for other consumers to try it.
Changing norms also change people’s values, and people who change their
individual behavior in line with their values on climate issues are more likely to
support climate policies. Policy, in turn, can support such norm change, but that
means telling people that their individual actions actually matter.

Ultimately, it’s not clear that all consumers value their consumer freedom as
much as politicians claim they do. Surveys suggest that people expect
governments to ensure healthy and sustainable diets. And while much of the
meat culture war focuses on alleged government overreach and consumer
freedom, research shows that the public, even if initially skeptical, tends to favor
policies that restrict individual consumer freedom once the benefits become
visible. This is the case for everything from urban congestion taxes to bans on
smoking in bars and even sugary drink taxes.

What does all of this mean for dietary change? The trite answer is that there is no
silver bullet solution and that we need an “all of the above” approach that
includes individual and collective action and policy shifts. We also need to accept
that any shift in the status quo is going to generate pushback. Eventually the
culture war over meat is going to have to be fought. The politicians brave enough
to fight it might just find that the public cares more about environmental and
public health—and maybe even animal rights—than their right to meat. But one
thing is clear: Backing down from proposing policies like a meat tax because of
potential political fights is a losing strategy. It’s important to be clear-eyed about
the fact that there is no single policy or set of policies that will work for all people
and in all places, and some conflicts—be they between proponents of back-to-the-
land agro-ecology and futurist boosters of alternative proteins, or between cattle
ranchers and the politicians who oppose beef— will not be amicably resolved.
That’s the stuff of politics.

But individual action can also be political. Individual changes in diet, while
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norms. Even if not everyone can do so, those who can make more sustainable
choices should. After all, how can we expect a public that’s unwilling to make any
individual changes to their diet to support policies that would restrict their diets?
It all matters. Change, as the environmentalists of old preached, begins on your
plate. But it can’t end there.

Jan Dutkiewicz @jan_dutkiewicz

Jan Dutkiewicz is a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal and a visiting fellow
in the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard University.

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