I can’t spend too much time on this right now but at a first glance I can potentially see two major problems:
1) Problem with collecting the data that should show the effect
2) Problem with calculating the costs
With the 1) to count the animals spared by 1 plant-based day you would have to check stuff like:
what kind of meal was replaced (beef/ chicken/ fish, so e.g. beef will mean fewer animals spared, because people eat a smaller portion of the animal, fish will mean more animals spared);
was the supply chain affected (so e.g. maybe it only means that instead of 2 chicken wings there are 3 served on Thursday because Friday is plant-based day)
are the kids eating the plant-based meals in the long run, or they bring meat sandwiches from home for that day, because they don’t like the plant-based alternative; or they eat extra meat at home in the evening to compensate for the lack of meat at school that day;
So these are just very few examples of many factors that should be accounted for in the calculations.
With the 2) to measure the cost you need not only focus on direct hours spent by a volunteer and PV employee but stuff like:
who is managing volunteers and how much time they put into: recruiting the volunteer, train the volunteer, and manage the volunteer weekly; and how much time the volunteer put into direct work but also in travel, etc.
when you count the time of ProVeg: the cost would be not only how much a person earns per hour that works directly on the campaign but also multiple costs like the cost of producing a leaflet/ PDF/ printed materials, the cost of the time manager spend on managing the person and training the person that is working on this campaign etc. (so e.g. in case of a more corporate-structured organization like ProVeg it will be: time of a person working directly on the campaign, graphic designer time, web developer time, research person time, manager and manager of a manager time and their boss too, HR person time, accountant time, office costs, utilities costs like coffee, juice, tea, printing materials etc.); and you only factored earnings per hour so it seems?
So yeah this is just a quick remark and a top of an iceberg if you want to really measure the impact of this intervention. I hope this will give you a sense of how you can go about it, because there is only one study on this type of intervention and if I remember correctly it was either not effective at all or barely effective. Hopefully, someone will find a link, so you can check how they went about the calculations.
are the kids eating the plant-based meals in the long run, or they bring meat sandwiches from home for that day, because they don’t like the plant-based alternative; or they eat extra meat at home in the evening to compensate for the lack of meat at school that day;
(...)
I hope this will give you a sense of how you can go about it, because there is only one study on this type of intervention and if I remember correctly it was either not effective at all or barely effective. Hopefully, someone will find a link, so you can check how they went about the calculations.
Here’s some relevant research and writing I’ve come across, but they don’t seem to estimate effects on meals at home:
More skipped meals (when allowed, depending on the school level), plate waste and eating less on vegetarian days in the short term (and pretty significant effects, like 18%-40% for each), while in the medium term, only eating less on veg days and skipping meals but also students eating more vegetarian meals on other days. It seems reasonably likely these students would eat more meat at home on average to compensate, but I don’t think this would cut the cost-effectiveness down by more than half.
I would assume they don’t fully compensate on average and they would do so less in the long run, but I don’t know how much they do (or whether some eat even fewer animal products at home), and this is something worth looking further into. There is research on rebound effects for voluntary (including nudging) meat reduction interventions (mostly seem small, from what I’ve seen), but we probably shouldn’t generalize from it, given how differently people react to being forced to do something.
The parents would also have a say on whether or not the students would eat more meat after school to compensate. They might encourage it or discourage it.
Thanks for your comment! You’re right in that there’s definitely much more complexity that I laid out in my post and model. Some things you’ve mentioned I’ve already accounted for so I’ll answer those below:
What kind of meal was replaced: I definitely agree that the number animals spared depends hugely on the meal that was replaced on any given day. This is what I meant when I said in my “improvements that could be made section” with:
Better estimates for the average number of animals eaten per meal and per school meal.
Although it hindsight, it’s not very clear exactly what I meant so I’ll clarify that in the post a bit more. There’s no obvious way for me to tell if most school serve cows, chickens or fish on any given day (as they might implement their vegetarian days on different days too) so I couldn’t make a reasonable assumption that it would be any certain animal affected most. Due to that, I went with the average value of animal deaths averted using this post by ACE . Obviously fish and other marine animals make up the most of those deaths so if we found out that the fish day was the least likely to be affected, it would bring down the number of animal deaths averted. This might be something we update once it’s implemented and we have a good idea of what meals were commonly swapped out.
Was the supply chain affected: This is similar to what Abraham was saying below too. To copy that reply: As we’ve been asking for this commitment on the basis on helping councils meet their climate targets and lower their catering costs, not actually purchasing less meat would be shooting themselves in the foot! Although I could definitely see some variation of this happening (e.g. purchasing 10% less vs 20% less). I’ll mention it to ProVeg in our meeting this week and will see if they’ve had similar issues in the past or if they’ve considered this. My initial guess is that ProVeg have already considered this as they’ve been doing this work for two years so I hope they’ve gotten past this issue! Also, I do see this campaign as different to most Meatless Mondays campaigns as this is run on an environmental and cost angle where councils commit because it helps them immediately with lowering costs so they actually have a strong incentive to purchase less meat. I don’t think this is the case with Meatless Mondays campaign that run on ethical stances.
Are the kids eating the plant-based meals in the long run: This is a good question. I believe ProVeg have been doing some impact assessment of their previous work to monitor the uptake of veggie and vegan meals so I’ll try get ahold of that data. However, as this is rolling out primarily in maintained government schools, there is a certain percentage of children who get free-school meals due to being from low-income households. In those cases, which I believe is 30% of kids in Hackney, I strongly doubt parents would send any meat options to the school as it’s unlikely they would want to turn down a free school meal. Also it seems like from MichaelStJules post below, there is some evidence that skipping meals could increase which would mean my final values are too high (for some cases). Broadly though I think we agree, if I wanted to make the model more rigorous, I would have included some variations of this point.
Regarding the cost calculations:
who is managing volunteers and how much time they put into: This was already accounted for in my model to produce the 170 hours figure for organising the campaign centrally. It’s volunteers (like myself) organising more volunteers so I accounted for all the weekly meetings we had, workshops we delivered, resources we created, etc. To be specific, I accounted for 3 people spending a total 8-9 hours per week for 5 months, which did include all the various activities needed for the campaign. This figure is low because no one works full-time or part-time on this campaign. We only have one 1-hour weekly meeting and offer 1.5 hour workshops every other week so it really isn’t very time intensive.
when you count the time of ProVeg: I think there’s an important distinction to be made between ProVeg International and ProVeg UK here. ProVeg UK is a very small team of only 3 staff so most of the things you talked about I believe don’t apply or are greatly simplified for such a small team. In addition, only one person works on the School Plates program full-time. You’re right in that I could have included their manager’s time but I think it would have been quite a bit more complex than what I wanted to do in terms of time I had for this. Instead, I over-estimated the time spent by ProVeg by about 25% to account for any other things I missed, like the items you outlined. Regarding the hourly pay—I converted a £40,000/year salary into an hourly rate using an online tool to make the calculation more convenient but it is based on someone getting an annual salary.
Overall, I definitely agree, there are more factors I could have included into this to make it extremely rigorous and watertight. Whilst I did account for some/most of the things you mentioned, it maybe wasn’t explicit in my post so apologies for that. I think also I should have put my epistemic uncertainty as I don’t think these values are 100% accurate and I didn’t do the research to justify that level of precision, but it’s maybe more like 70-80%.
Hey James, I don’t know how it is now, but I worked at ProVeg Poland (so a country chapter like ProVeg UK) like 3 years ago and we worked on everything extremely slowly so i.e. a person that will be working on a campaign would have to ask the graphic people to design the graphics, then they would have to consult with the country manager, the manager would have a meeting with other country managers, these country managers were managed by a person from the leadership and the leadership would have their own meetings. On top of that, there was one international HR department that will do evaluations with employees, and there will be accountants that would deal with the salary, you would also spend time on being trained, conferences, team meetings, yearly reports, consulting PR department, country office, office costs etc. So like in each single thing you wanted to do in a country there was a huge team involved. I would definitely talk to them to get REAL numbers. I think this will impact your cost-effectiveness.
Hi James,
I can’t spend too much time on this right now but at a first glance I can potentially see two major problems:
1) Problem with collecting the data that should show the effect
2) Problem with calculating the costs
With the 1) to count the animals spared by 1 plant-based day you would have to check stuff like:
what kind of meal was replaced (beef/ chicken/ fish, so e.g. beef will mean fewer animals spared, because people eat a smaller portion of the animal, fish will mean more animals spared);
was the supply chain affected (so e.g. maybe it only means that instead of 2 chicken wings there are 3 served on Thursday because Friday is plant-based day)
are the kids eating the plant-based meals in the long run, or they bring meat sandwiches from home for that day, because they don’t like the plant-based alternative; or they eat extra meat at home in the evening to compensate for the lack of meat at school that day;
So these are just very few examples of many factors that should be accounted for in the calculations.
With the 2) to measure the cost you need not only focus on direct hours spent by a volunteer and PV employee but stuff like:
who is managing volunteers and how much time they put into: recruiting the volunteer, train the volunteer, and manage the volunteer weekly; and how much time the volunteer put into direct work but also in travel, etc.
when you count the time of ProVeg: the cost would be not only how much a person earns per hour that works directly on the campaign but also multiple costs like the cost of producing a leaflet/ PDF/ printed materials, the cost of the time manager spend on managing the person and training the person that is working on this campaign etc. (so e.g. in case of a more corporate-structured organization like ProVeg it will be: time of a person working directly on the campaign, graphic designer time, web developer time, research person time, manager and manager of a manager time and their boss too, HR person time, accountant time, office costs, utilities costs like coffee, juice, tea, printing materials etc.); and you only factored earnings per hour so it seems?
So yeah this is just a quick remark and a top of an iceberg if you want to really measure the impact of this intervention. I hope this will give you a sense of how you can go about it, because there is only one study on this type of intervention and if I remember correctly it was either not effective at all or barely effective. Hopefully, someone will find a link, so you can check how they went about the calculations.
Here’s some relevant research and writing I’ve come across, but they don’t seem to estimate effects on meals at home:
Forced Choice Restriction in Promoting Sustainable Food Consumption: Intended and Unintended Effects of the Mandatory Vegetarian Day in Helsinki Schools
More skipped meals (when allowed, depending on the school level), plate waste and eating less on vegetarian days in the short term (and pretty significant effects, like 18%-40% for each), while in the medium term, only eating less on veg days and skipping meals but also students eating more vegetarian meals on other days. It seems reasonably likely these students would eat more meat at home on average to compensate, but I don’t think this would cut the cost-effectiveness down by more than half.
Nutritional quality and acceptability of a weekly vegetarian lunch in primary-school canteens in Ghent, Belgium: ‘Thursday Veggie Day’ | Public Health Nutrition | Cambridge Core
Differences in plate waste were small enough to ignore.
Meat Reduction by Force: The Case of “Meatless Monday” in the Norwegian Armed Forces
Vox: A French city announced it would serve meatless school lunches. The backlash was swift.
I would assume they don’t fully compensate on average and they would do so less in the long run, but I don’t know how much they do (or whether some eat even fewer animal products at home), and this is something worth looking further into. There is research on rebound effects for voluntary (including nudging) meat reduction interventions (mostly seem small, from what I’ve seen), but we probably shouldn’t generalize from it, given how differently people react to being forced to do something.
The parents would also have a say on whether or not the students would eat more meat after school to compensate. They might encourage it or discourage it.
Hi Ula,
Thanks for your comment! You’re right in that there’s definitely much more complexity that I laid out in my post and model. Some things you’ve mentioned I’ve already accounted for so I’ll answer those below:
What kind of meal was replaced: I definitely agree that the number animals spared depends hugely on the meal that was replaced on any given day. This is what I meant when I said in my “improvements that could be made section” with:
Although it hindsight, it’s not very clear exactly what I meant so I’ll clarify that in the post a bit more. There’s no obvious way for me to tell if most school serve cows, chickens or fish on any given day (as they might implement their vegetarian days on different days too) so I couldn’t make a reasonable assumption that it would be any certain animal affected most. Due to that, I went with the average value of animal deaths averted using this post by ACE . Obviously fish and other marine animals make up the most of those deaths so if we found out that the fish day was the least likely to be affected, it would bring down the number of animal deaths averted. This might be something we update once it’s implemented and we have a good idea of what meals were commonly swapped out.
Was the supply chain affected: This is similar to what Abraham was saying below too. To copy that reply: As we’ve been asking for this commitment on the basis on helping councils meet their climate targets and lower their catering costs, not actually purchasing less meat would be shooting themselves in the foot! Although I could definitely see some variation of this happening (e.g. purchasing 10% less vs 20% less). I’ll mention it to ProVeg in our meeting this week and will see if they’ve had similar issues in the past or if they’ve considered this. My initial guess is that ProVeg have already considered this as they’ve been doing this work for two years so I hope they’ve gotten past this issue! Also, I do see this campaign as different to most Meatless Mondays campaigns as this is run on an environmental and cost angle where councils commit because it helps them immediately with lowering costs so they actually have a strong incentive to purchase less meat. I don’t think this is the case with Meatless Mondays campaign that run on ethical stances.
Are the kids eating the plant-based meals in the long run: This is a good question. I believe ProVeg have been doing some impact assessment of their previous work to monitor the uptake of veggie and vegan meals so I’ll try get ahold of that data. However, as this is rolling out primarily in maintained government schools, there is a certain percentage of children who get free-school meals due to being from low-income households. In those cases, which I believe is 30% of kids in Hackney, I strongly doubt parents would send any meat options to the school as it’s unlikely they would want to turn down a free school meal. Also it seems like from MichaelStJules post below, there is some evidence that skipping meals could increase which would mean my final values are too high (for some cases). Broadly though I think we agree, if I wanted to make the model more rigorous, I would have included some variations of this point.
Regarding the cost calculations:
who is managing volunteers and how much time they put into: This was already accounted for in my model to produce the 170 hours figure for organising the campaign centrally. It’s volunteers (like myself) organising more volunteers so I accounted for all the weekly meetings we had, workshops we delivered, resources we created, etc. To be specific, I accounted for 3 people spending a total 8-9 hours per week for 5 months, which did include all the various activities needed for the campaign. This figure is low because no one works full-time or part-time on this campaign. We only have one 1-hour weekly meeting and offer 1.5 hour workshops every other week so it really isn’t very time intensive.
when you count the time of ProVeg: I think there’s an important distinction to be made between ProVeg International and ProVeg UK here. ProVeg UK is a very small team of only 3 staff so most of the things you talked about I believe don’t apply or are greatly simplified for such a small team. In addition, only one person works on the School Plates program full-time. You’re right in that I could have included their manager’s time but I think it would have been quite a bit more complex than what I wanted to do in terms of time I had for this. Instead, I over-estimated the time spent by ProVeg by about 25% to account for any other things I missed, like the items you outlined. Regarding the hourly pay—I converted a £40,000/year salary into an hourly rate using an online tool to make the calculation more convenient but it is based on someone getting an annual salary.
Overall, I definitely agree, there are more factors I could have included into this to make it extremely rigorous and watertight. Whilst I did account for some/most of the things you mentioned, it maybe wasn’t explicit in my post so apologies for that. I think also I should have put my epistemic uncertainty as I don’t think these values are 100% accurate and I didn’t do the research to justify that level of precision, but it’s maybe more like 70-80%.
Hey James,
I don’t know how it is now, but I worked at ProVeg Poland (so a country chapter like ProVeg UK) like 3 years ago and we worked on everything extremely slowly so i.e. a person that will be working on a campaign would have to ask the graphic people to design the graphics, then they would have to consult with the country manager, the manager would have a meeting with other country managers, these country managers were managed by a person from the leadership and the leadership would have their own meetings. On top of that, there was one international HR department that will do evaluations with employees, and there will be accountants that would deal with the salary, you would also spend time on being trained, conferences, team meetings, yearly reports, consulting PR department, country office, office costs etc. So like in each single thing you wanted to do in a country there was a huge team involved. I would definitely talk to them to get REAL numbers. I think this will impact your cost-effectiveness.