Getting People to Eat Less Meat

Ending Factory Farming is a Moral Issue

Getting people to eat less meat is at the heart of the movement to end factory farming. As it stands right now, there is a huge amount of demand for animal products and the only way to cheaply and reliably produce enough to supply the demand is through factory farming. Thus a realistic approach to help end factory farming is to reduce the amount of demand for animal products while advocating for public policy reform and other legal changes.

There are many reasons to end factory farming:

• Environmental Impact (Pollution, land and water use, etc.)
• Effect on Workers (Injuries, Exploitation, etc.)
• Public Health (Zoonotic Disease, Antibiotic Usages, etc.)
• Animal Welfare (Living Conditions, Slaughter, etc.)
• Personal Health (Cleanliness, Processed Meats, etc.)

I think that a lot of the above reasons are moral (i.e. centered around notions of wrongness), but is morality the best angle to employ as a social movement? Engaging in moralizing with people is a double-edged sword. Morality can move people deeply, as evidenced by people who go vegan because they are concerned about animal welfare.

However at the same time, it is an emotional minefield to try to traverse engaging with someone on a moral level without making someone feel bad about themselves. People really don’t like to feel bad about themselves. For example, someone might think that they care about animals, but when faced with the inconsistency of the fact that they eat meat they may not handle the cognitive dissonance very well. When faced with cognitive dissonance the mind/body might associate that stress with the idea of being “under attack” which may cause someone to dig in and try to defend their beliefs rather than engaging with new information.

Moral Education Is Not The Answer

While eating less meat and ending factory farming are certainly moral issues, I do not think that the solution is moral education. This isn’t to say that I don’t think that we should be doing it at all, just that I don’t think that it is a silver bullet solution and that it should really be the go-to strategy.

For one, increasing education does not sway moral decision making that much. As research has shown, there is little to no effect of studying ethics in improving moral behavior. We could of course say that this may not generalize as well for eating animal products, but I personally think that there isn’t good reason to think that. If this was true, then if we were to put a cohort of people into a class where they learn about all the reasons that factory farming is bad, we would expect that all of them (or at least most of them) would become vegan after it. However I have the intuition that this wouldn’t be the case.

I think that this is mostly because there are other reasons that people make decisions beyond morality. For example:

• Rational: Based on logical foundations
• Egotistical: How does this affect/benefit/harm me?
• Convention: Social norms, religious/spiritual beliefs, etc.
• Practical Considerations: Convenience, efficiency, cost
• Personal Identify: How does this fit into how I see myself?

Secondly, I don’t think that convincing people to care about factory farming is necessary for them to reduce their meat consumption. While it may be “better” for a person to understand why eating meat is bad and stop because of that, any kind of reduction in meat consumption is a net positive.

What Is The Answer Then?

There have already been individual changes made by the innovators and early adopters for there to be some degree of normalization and infrastructure to be created for large scale adoption of plant-based diets. I think that early vegans were the innovators and we are now in the early adoption to early majority stage of the adoption curve of plant-based diets. There are more plant-based consumer packaged goods then ever, all of which make it more convenient (cheaper, widely available) for people to have a plant-based diet.

Education will be an ongoing effort, take what the New Roots Institute or the Reducetarian Fellowship are doing for example.

Reducing negative associations will also help with normalization efforts:

• Reducing political associations with plant-based diets
  • There may be an inherent connection with veganism and leftism (Source), but that may only be among early vegans (environmentalists and animal welfare advocates)
• Reduction of stigma with vegan foods (“overly processed”, “fake”, “bad tasting”, “expensive”)

More research should be done into understanding consumer preferences. There are some great studies out so far, but I still think that it is a burgeoning field of research. Examples:

• Plant-Based Meat Alternatives: Motivational Adoption Barriers and Solutions
• Adolescent’s Willingness to Adopt a More Plant-Based Diet: A Theory-Based Interview Study
• Plant-Based versus Conventional Meat: Substitution, Complementarity, and Market Impacts

While individual changes are important, institutional changes can move the needle forward more:

• Making corporations, hospitals, and other institutions offer (more or exclusively) plant-based food options in dining areas
• Reducing the usage of animal-derived food ingredients in other foods
• Rethinking meat consumption – How institutional shifts affect the sustainable protein transition