Thanks for your response and sincere apologies for being flippant in the previous comment. New to the forum and clearly misjudged my language, too used to less friendly parts of the internet i guess. I also certainly agree with the overall thesis you make that its not so simple as ‘if you build it they will come’, and as far as pmas go far more complex than parity of taste, price, convenience.
That said, I do still think that the framing of pma ‘just replacing veggies’ seems at odds with the research design and presents a risk of misinterpretation and alienation of those who don’t share the same goals for reducing farmed animals in our food system. If this were true we should absolutely flag it, but the headline presents it as though the pma option was nutritionally less complete. If it had been against chickpeas or something that would be a more reasonable conclusion in my view, but not compared to nothing and free guacamole.
I appreciate the limitations were acknowledged but also do think that relative to the broad headwinds for vegan diets generally at the moment, we as a community need to be careful not to overfit. Relative to the extent of the uncertainty for this kind of study design, the conclusions do maybe paint a stronger picture than is justified—particularly relative to the existing research we have from more robust real world studies and the relative performance of such options when a genuine choice is offered (albeit there is wide variation in exact methods).
I do think broadly that parity is not likely to be sufficient to genuinely shift mainstream behaviour, and non meat whatever form it takes must be better on some averaged matrix of cost price and convenience (or normalcy), however I don’t think this study is compelling evidence of the stated conclusion in the title and the way it is posed i think presents a risk of misinterpretation that could be quite harmful.
Thanks for your response and sincere apologies for being flippant in the previous comment. New to the forum and clearly misjudged my language, too used to less friendly parts of the internet i guess. I also certainly agree with the overall thesis you make that its not so simple as ‘if you build it they will come’, and as far as pmas go far more complex than parity of taste, price, convenience.
That said, I do still think that the framing of pma ‘just replacing veggies’ seems at odds with the research design and presents a risk of misinterpretation and alienation of those who don’t share the same goals for reducing farmed animals in our food system. If this were true we should absolutely flag it, but the headline presents it as though the pma option was nutritionally less complete. If it had been against chickpeas or something that would be a more reasonable conclusion in my view, but not compared to nothing and free guacamole.
I appreciate the limitations were acknowledged but also do think that relative to the broad headwinds for vegan diets generally at the moment, we as a community need to be careful not to overfit. Relative to the extent of the uncertainty for this kind of study design, the conclusions do maybe paint a stronger picture than is justified—particularly relative to the existing research we have from more robust real world studies and the relative performance of such options when a genuine choice is offered (albeit there is wide variation in exact methods).
I do think broadly that parity is not likely to be sufficient to genuinely shift mainstream behaviour, and non meat whatever form it takes must be better on some averaged matrix of cost price and convenience (or normalcy), however I don’t think this study is compelling evidence of the stated conclusion in the title and the way it is posed i think presents a risk of misinterpretation that could be quite harmful.