Using quite an expansive definition of institutional diet change advocacy, we identified that two of the 30 EA AWF grants (constituting 0.27% of funding) went to these kinds of activities, compared to six out of 28 MG grants (constituting 11.12% of funding).
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Are institutional diet change advocacy campaigns competitive with other opportunities?
To understand whether this difference constituted a concern, we asked experts for their views on the promisingness of institutional diet change advocacy.
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On existing evidence, some institutional diet change advocacy campaigns can meet a cost-effectiveness bar, but this is not typical.
It’s probable that most of the impact of institutional diet change advocacy runs through direct impact rather than movement building.
Which diet change interventions are more cost-effective than cage-free corporate campaigns? Meaningfully reducing meat consumption is an unsolved problem, and I suspect many diet change interventions are harmful due to leading to the replacement of beef and pork with poultry meat, eggs (which can be part of a vegetarian diet), fish and other seafood.
In any case, I do not think this is that important for your recommendation. You found only 11.1 % of the money granted by ACE MG went to diet change interventions, and it does not look like marginal grants were super related to diet change.
In support of being more funding constrained, ACE also provided us with a summary of how they would likely have disbursed an additional $200K–300K USD in the 2024 round. This included a mixture of fully funding more of the opportunities that they only partially funded, and funding some opportunities that missed out altogether in the round — in particular, two opportunities related to insect farming. We attempted to naively model the scope of some of the opportunities that MG indicated they would have funded and concluded that we expect these opportunities to have relatively high marginal cost-effectiveness — competitive with other opportunities ACE MG funded.
Thanks for the comment! I first want to highlight that in our report we are specifically talking about institutional diet change interventions that reduce animal product consumption by replacing institutional (e.g., school) meals containing animal products with meals that don’t. This approach, which constitutes the majority of diet change programs that ACE MG funds, doesn’t necessarily involve convincing individuals to make conscious changes to their consumption habits.
Our understanding of a common view among the experts we consulted is that diet change interventions are generally not competitive with promising welfare asks in terms of cost-effectiveness, but that some of the most promising institutional diet change interventions plausibly could be. For example, I think some of our experts would have considered the grant ACE MG made to the Plant-Based Universities campaign worth funding. Reasons for this include:
The organisers have a good track record
The ask is for a full transition to plant-based catering, which reduces small animal replacement concerns
The model involves training students to campaign, meaning the campaign can reach more universities than the organisation could by going school-to-school themselves
As noted in the report, not all experts agreed that the institutional diet change interventions were on average competitive with the welfare interventions ACE MG funded. However, as you noted, this probably has a fairly limited impact on how cost-effective ACE MG is on the margin, not least because these grants made up a small fraction of ACE MG’s 2024 funding.
Thanks, Aidan. For reference, I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 25.1 times as cost-effective as School Plates, which is a program aiming to increase the consumption of plant-based foods at schools and universities in the United Kingdom.
From your evaluation of ACE MG:
Which diet change interventions are more cost-effective than cage-free corporate campaigns? Meaningfully reducing meat consumption is an unsolved problem, and I suspect many diet change interventions are harmful due to leading to the replacement of beef and pork with poultry meat, eggs (which can be part of a vegetarian diet), fish and other seafood.
In any case, I do not think this is that important for your recommendation. You found only 11.1 % of the money granted by ACE MG went to diet change interventions, and it does not look like marginal grants were super related to diet change.
Thanks for the comment! I first want to highlight that in our report we are specifically talking about institutional diet change interventions that reduce animal product consumption by replacing institutional (e.g., school) meals containing animal products with meals that don’t. This approach, which constitutes the majority of diet change programs that ACE MG funds, doesn’t necessarily involve convincing individuals to make conscious changes to their consumption habits.
Our understanding of a common view among the experts we consulted is that diet change interventions are generally not competitive with promising welfare asks in terms of cost-effectiveness, but that some of the most promising institutional diet change interventions plausibly could be. For example, I think some of our experts would have considered the grant ACE MG made to the Plant-Based Universities campaign worth funding. Reasons for this include:
The organisers have a good track record
The ask is for a full transition to plant-based catering, which reduces small animal replacement concerns
The model involves training students to campaign, meaning the campaign can reach more universities than the organisation could by going school-to-school themselves
As noted in the report, not all experts agreed that the institutional diet change interventions were on average competitive with the welfare interventions ACE MG funded. However, as you noted, this probably has a fairly limited impact on how cost-effective ACE MG is on the margin, not least because these grants made up a small fraction of ACE MG’s 2024 funding.
Thanks, Aidan. For reference, I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 25.1 times as cost-effective as School Plates, which is a program aiming to increase the consumption of plant-based foods at schools and universities in the United Kingdom.