I work at a university in China, and with the help of some vegetarian students, I’ve been trying to encourage others to eat less meat. However, I’ve found it challenging to engage students who aren’t already interested in vegetarianism.
For instance, last semester, I organized a Meatless Monday Lunch every week. The same group of people I already knew would attend, but it didn’t attract new participants. I even offered free lunches to students to make it more appealing, but that didn’t seem to help.
I also hosted a documentary screening about the health effects of eating meat. Attendance was very low—fewer than 10 people showed up—and most of them seemed distracted, spending their time on their phones.
On the bright side, our canteen has improved its plant-based options with our help. I think this may encourage more people to try them. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the canteen’s data, so I’m not sure if this idea actually worked. Personally it did make eating at the canteen a bit more pleasant.
Thank you for sharing your work and taking an active stance to promote vegetarianism. In my personal experience of becoming vegetarian, two things stand out that may be relevant:
I’m quite sure my own decision has significantly changed how much meat my family and friends consume, both in the meals we cook and share as well as their comments suggesting that they’re trying to take my lead and eat a little less meat.
Discovering a wide variety of delicious and easy to cook vegetarian food has made the switch easier for me and also encouraged my family to cook those dishes more frequently.
My point is that these small and seemingly self directed actions (I never actively tried to convince others) can make a difference. Striving for wider impact is important, but don’t undervalue your individual efforts!
Definitely! When I went vegan, I prompted someone I know to look up how dairy cows are treated (not well), and they changed their diet quite a bit in light of that. So I have seen downstream effects personally. Caveat that I am annoying and prone to evangelize.
And if i were going to promote one definitely-not-scalable intervention to one very-hard-to-reach-population, I would take a bunch of die-hard meat eaters to Han Dynasty on the upper west side of Manhattan and order 1) DanDan noodles without pork 2) pea leaves with garlic 3) cumin tofu 4) kung pao tofu and 5) eggplant in garlic sauce for the table, and then ask “hello is this not delicious??” every 30 seconds 😃
This is a bit of late reply. I have tried to take some of my family members and friends to vegetarian restaurants. Sometimes they are open to try it. Sometimes they outright refuses to go because “it is a waste of money” even if I promise to pay. I guess the lesson is that there no method that works universally. We just got to try different methods on different people.
I work at a university in China, and with the help of some vegetarian students, I’ve been trying to encourage others to eat less meat. However, I’ve found it challenging to engage students who aren’t already interested in vegetarianism.
For instance, last semester, I organized a Meatless Monday Lunch every week. The same group of people I already knew would attend, but it didn’t attract new participants. I even offered free lunches to students to make it more appealing, but that didn’t seem to help.
I also hosted a documentary screening about the health effects of eating meat. Attendance was very low—fewer than 10 people showed up—and most of them seemed distracted, spending their time on their phones.
On the bright side, our canteen has improved its plant-based options with our help. I think this may encourage more people to try them. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the canteen’s data, so I’m not sure if this idea actually worked. Personally it did make eating at the canteen a bit more pleasant.
Thank you for sharing your work and taking an active stance to promote vegetarianism. In my personal experience of becoming vegetarian, two things stand out that may be relevant:
I’m quite sure my own decision has significantly changed how much meat my family and friends consume, both in the meals we cook and share as well as their comments suggesting that they’re trying to take my lead and eat a little less meat.
Discovering a wide variety of delicious and easy to cook vegetarian food has made the switch easier for me and also encouraged my family to cook those dishes more frequently.
My point is that these small and seemingly self directed actions (I never actively tried to convince others) can make a difference. Striving for wider impact is important, but don’t undervalue your individual efforts!
Definitely! When I went vegan, I prompted someone I know to look up how dairy cows are treated (not well), and they changed their diet quite a bit in light of that. So I have seen downstream effects personally. Caveat that I am annoying and prone to evangelize.
And if i were going to promote one definitely-not-scalable intervention to one very-hard-to-reach-population, I would take a bunch of die-hard meat eaters to Han Dynasty on the upper west side of Manhattan and order 1) DanDan noodles without pork 2) pea leaves with garlic 3) cumin tofu 4) kung pao tofu and 5) eggplant in garlic sauce for the table, and then ask “hello is this not delicious??” every 30 seconds 😃
This is a bit of late reply. I have tried to take some of my family members and friends to vegetarian restaurants. Sometimes they are open to try it. Sometimes they outright refuses to go because “it is a waste of money” even if I promise to pay. I guess the lesson is that there no method that works universally. We just got to try different methods on different people.
That sounds very interesting!
Making things more pleasant for vegetarians and vegans is a good thing to do, even if it does not change other people’s behavior too much.
In the long-run, we want to make vegetarianism seem just as “nice, natural, and normal” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666315001518) as eating meat.
I think things like a Meatless Monday Lunch are very helpful for that.