The taste of bacon vs. ‘the greater good’: an uneven battle
The value-action gap in reducing meat consumption
Is this you? You care about animals, have become aware that meat consumption is part of a huge ethical, environmental and health problem (you might even have watched a striking/terrifying documentary or two) and have set an intention to reduce your meat intake or even cut it altogether. You also go out for dinner on a Friday night and, despite seeing plant-based alternatives on the menu, order a beef burger, with bacon. If that rings a bell, rest assured: you are not alone.
As a society, we are becoming more and more aware of the unsustainability of our meat consumption. According to a 2020 survey, the majority (65%) of people in the UK want to eat less meat in the future, motivated mostly by health reasons. But do we walk the walk? It turns out not really, with only 21% of people eating less meat than a year ago. A similar pattern emerges each year with Veganuary: just looking at its last edition a record half a million people pledged to eat vegan for January in 2021 but only two weeks later 70% of them had given up!
Another glorious example of the value-action gap, proving that intentions are not enough to change our behaviour.
But why is giving up animal products so hard?
Our decision-making is less conscious and more influenced by our environment than we think
We like to believe we are rational, judicious individuals but we often don’t realise how much of our decision making actually happens without our deliberate input.
And that’s a good thing! It would take a huge toll on our headspace if we had to evaluate and weigh all possible factors every time we make a decision (research shows we make 35000 decisions a day — and over 220 about food only), so much of the process happens unconsciously as our brain picks up on context cues and past memories to alleviate this cognitive load.
Decisions about food, in particular, tend to be more automatic and subconscious than others, because eating is a necessary behaviour for survival. This means food choices tend to be even more rapid, instinctive, and influenced by mental shortcuts like familiarity, defaults, what the majority of people around you are eating, or even the order in which items appear on a menu.
All this to say by the time the waiter arrives to take your order, your subconscious will have already identified and processed hundreds of little cues and will be pushing you towards what it deems is the optimal choice, one that may not always reflect your most rational intentions.
A BigMac in the hand is worth Sustainability in the bush
One of the main biases that unconsciously influences our decision-making process (and our food orders) is an exaggerated predilection for immediate gratification.
We know taste is the top driver when it comes to our food choices, even in less ‘hedonic’ categories like vegetables , and that we tend to prioritise it over other factors like cost, convenience or health.
But why does something as superficial as flavour trump other, in theory more important attributes like the nutritional content of food or whether it’s been produced ethically? The answer is hyperbolic discounting — our brain’s inclination to choose immediate rewards over long-term benefits, even if these instant rewards are smaller. And this is not as illogical as it seems, if you think about if from an evolutionary perspective: when we have to make a decision, it makes sense to favour gains that are certain over larger prizes we might not end up securing. In other words, the immediate gratification (and nourishment) you’ll get from eating that cheeseburger is 100% guaranteed, while the effects it could potentially have on your health or the planet are vague, distant and not even warranted; so your brain decides the burger is the less risky choice.
And food FOMO is real
So what if the vegan alternative is just as tasty?
Sadly, if you are used to eating meat, a delicious plant-based burger simply won’t hold the same weight as its equally delicious beef counterpart, because your brain is hardwired to prefer the status quo. Also, psychologically speaking, the pain of missing out on that beef burger is twice as powerful as the pleasure you would gain from the vegan alternative, even if they are both exactly as tasty.
So what can we do?
Solving our meat consumption problem won’t be an easy task. It will require big structural changes in our food systems and attitudes (like our cultural obsession with protein or the weird association of meat consumption & masculinity), and these won’t be met without resistance.
But there are also small interventions that can help us move in the right direction by influencing our unconscious thinking in favour of plant-based products - with minimal effort and investment. It’s called choice architecture, and organisations have been deploying it for decades to “guide” our decision-making with more or less noble purposes (like governments making organ donation the default knowing that less people will make the effort to actively opt out of it, or McDonald's employees asking you whether you want to super-size your meal to nudge you to spend more).
Similar strategies can be used to ‘help consumers help themselves’, letting them make choices that are aligned with their values, through simple interventions like changing the way products are displayed or the language used to describe them:
Integration over segregation
One of the easiest areas of intervention is product display. When plant-based alternatives are segregated (put in a different aisle or part of the menu) this can prime people to think they are less desirable. After all the majority of people are omnivores (in the UK only 7% of the population identify as vegan and 11% as vegetarian) so putting otherwise appealing options under these labels can contribute to alienate those that eat meat as well. Integrating them into the main offer however, can improve their appeal substantially, framing them as ‘delicious food that happens to be plant-based’ instead of ‘a sad alternative for those that can’t have “the real stuff”.
Several studies have documented how integration can increase demand for plant-based products — for example showing that placing vegetarian options on a separate part of the menu reduced orders by 56%, or that putting “veggie only” refrigerators for food to go items significantly reduced sales of these at Pret at Manger.
Language matters too
As we’ve seen, taste is king when it comes to food choices, and people are less likely to choose a plant-based alternative if they feel they are sacrificing pleasure, therefore product labels can be chosen intentionally to a) make these products sound aspirational and indulgent and b) move away from language that evokes notions of restriction or incompleteness, such as “meat-free” , “no meat” or “vegan”.
A 2017 study found that labelling vegetables with indulgent descriptions (like “Twisted Carrots” and “Dynamite Beets”) significantly increased the number of people choosing these and even the amount of vegetables consumed, compared with basic or healthy descriptions (like “high-antioxidant beets”), despite no changes in the actual preparation of the vegetables.
In another study, researchers observed significant sales uplifts as they changed dish names to put the focus on the taste or origin of the product. For instance, changing “Meat-free Sausage and Mash” to “Cumberland Spice Veggie sausages and Mash” resulted in a 70% sales increase.
There is no doubt that there is still much to do if we want to solve the meat consumption crisis, and more needs to change than just our intentions, but if our subconscious decision-making is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution.
