FWIW, I taught a couple of classes online recently for a university in China, and we discussed a bit about EA and animal welfare. The undergrad students hadn’t thought much about factory farming or animal suffering, but seemed quite open to thinking about it; their attitudes and responses seemed broadly consistent with what this report found.
One cultural challenge in China is the high amount of food waste, given the tradition of over-ordering food in restaurants and at official, corporate, and university events, as a show of wealth, status, and generosity towards guests. Over-ordering of meat, chicken, and fish is seen as especially reputable (if the guests are reduced to eating rice as a way to fill up after all the meat is gone, that’s seen as pretty embarrassing for the host.) And of course, if the animal products are there on the table, looking delicious, people will tend to eat as much as they can, so the amount of visible waste (actual left-over food that gets thrown out) is a lower bound on the amount of avoidable waste (i.e. animals that do get eaten, but that people would have been happy not to eat, given their actual hunger levels).
President Xi has been fighting this food waste issue with his ‘Clean Plate’ campaign, but I don’t know how successful it has been.
Anyway, reducing food waste by nudging people away from conspicuous consumption of meat as a status symbol, might be some low-hanging fruit in reducing demand for animal products in China.
Thanks very much for sharing this summary.
FWIW, I taught a couple of classes online recently for a university in China, and we discussed a bit about EA and animal welfare. The undergrad students hadn’t thought much about factory farming or animal suffering, but seemed quite open to thinking about it; their attitudes and responses seemed broadly consistent with what this report found.
One cultural challenge in China is the high amount of food waste, given the tradition of over-ordering food in restaurants and at official, corporate, and university events, as a show of wealth, status, and generosity towards guests. Over-ordering of meat, chicken, and fish is seen as especially reputable (if the guests are reduced to eating rice as a way to fill up after all the meat is gone, that’s seen as pretty embarrassing for the host.) And of course, if the animal products are there on the table, looking delicious, people will tend to eat as much as they can, so the amount of visible waste (actual left-over food that gets thrown out) is a lower bound on the amount of avoidable waste (i.e. animals that do get eaten, but that people would have been happy not to eat, given their actual hunger levels).
President Xi has been fighting this food waste issue with his ‘Clean Plate’ campaign, but I don’t know how successful it has been.
Anyway, reducing food waste by nudging people away from conspicuous consumption of meat as a status symbol, might be some low-hanging fruit in reducing demand for animal products in China.