I am grateful for this project, and I do believe that developing good alt meats will help. However, some work such as Rethink Priorities’ review of the PTC (Price, Taste, Convenience) hypothesis suggests that developing alternatives that win on all three metrics will not have as great an impact as we might hope. I am wondering how you think about this issue.
Thanks Michael, this deserves a longer response but a few thoughts on PTC (additional to the discussion in the original post):
I do agree with Jacob / Rethink’s nudge that the alt proteins space needs to explore other theories of change—priorities 3 and to a certain extent 4 in this RFP rely less on this model being true (and more on what it would take for food manufacturers to adjust their formulations away from animal products).
That said, I think there are perhaps two reasons one might underweight the review slightly:
Taste is underspecified IMO. The operationalization (to my memory) is mostly blind or informed hedonic tests on finished products. These are useful inputs but arguably underpowered for the question they’re being asked to answer, and don’t account for population heterogeneity in taste perception. A broader operationalization using analytical chemistry (eg. OAV profiles) suggests current products have made real progress but are nowhere near equivalence to target meats. So “taste-competitive PBM doesn’t displace meat” is plausibly too strong a claim, using the evidence on current products.
On price, I’m less sure cross-price elasticity is the right lens: It’s intuitively appealing, and the Rethink paper uses it sensibly, but I haven’t found a historical food transition where x-price elasticity estimates were good forward predictors of how consumption shares would change with price changes. Chicken vs beef in the latter half of the 20th century is a plausible example—the x-price elasticity estimates tell a pretty confusing story, even though most people’s intuitive read seems to be that chicken at least limited beef’s growth. I think this reflects something about how the framework handles novelty and norm shifts at low penetration.
Ultimately predicting shifts in tastes or technological change over long timescales is hard, and having good-tasting alt meat available seems like a decent bet to have placed under uncertainty.
Those are all good points, and to be sure, I do expect that the development of non-animal protein that satisfies PTC will reduce meat consumption. By just how much, I agree that we can’t predict, as it depends on many other factors. I strongly support the development of good alt-meat.
But I think some other historical analogies are instructive. For example, with aquaculture and wild-catch fishing and with low-carbon energy and fossil fuels, there have been major rebound effects that made these substitutes much less effective as replacements than one might have predicted in advance. I expect a similar thing to happen with alt-meat.
I am grateful for this project, and I do believe that developing good alt meats will help. However, some work such as Rethink Priorities’ review of the PTC (Price, Taste, Convenience) hypothesis suggests that developing alternatives that win on all three metrics will not have as great an impact as we might hope. I am wondering how you think about this issue.
Thanks Michael, this deserves a longer response but a few thoughts on PTC (additional to the discussion in the original post):
I do agree with Jacob / Rethink’s nudge that the alt proteins space needs to explore other theories of change—priorities 3 and to a certain extent 4 in this RFP rely less on this model being true (and more on what it would take for food manufacturers to adjust their formulations away from animal products).
That said, I think there are perhaps two reasons one might underweight the review slightly:
Taste is underspecified IMO. The operationalization (to my memory) is mostly blind or informed hedonic tests on finished products. These are useful inputs but arguably underpowered for the question they’re being asked to answer, and don’t account for population heterogeneity in taste perception. A broader operationalization using analytical chemistry (eg. OAV profiles) suggests current products have made real progress but are nowhere near equivalence to target meats. So “taste-competitive PBM doesn’t displace meat” is plausibly too strong a claim, using the evidence on current products.
On price, I’m less sure cross-price elasticity is the right lens: It’s intuitively appealing, and the Rethink paper uses it sensibly, but I haven’t found a historical food transition where x-price elasticity estimates were good forward predictors of how consumption shares would change with price changes. Chicken vs beef in the latter half of the 20th century is a plausible example—the x-price elasticity estimates tell a pretty confusing story, even though most people’s intuitive read seems to be that chicken at least limited beef’s growth. I think this reflects something about how the framework handles novelty and norm shifts at low penetration.
Ultimately predicting shifts in tastes or technological change over long timescales is hard, and having good-tasting alt meat available seems like a decent bet to have placed under uncertainty.
Those are all good points, and to be sure, I do expect that the development of non-animal protein that satisfies PTC will reduce meat consumption. By just how much, I agree that we can’t predict, as it depends on many other factors. I strongly support the development of good alt-meat.
But I think some other historical analogies are instructive. For example, with aquaculture and wild-catch fishing and with low-carbon energy and fossil fuels, there have been major rebound effects that made these substitutes much less effective as replacements than one might have predicted in advance. I expect a similar thing to happen with alt-meat.