Open Phil claims that campaigns to make more Americans go vegan and vegetarian haven’t been very successful. But does this analysis account for immigration?
If people who already live in the US are shifting their diets, but new immigrants skew omnivore, a simple analysis could easily miss the former shift because immigration is fairly large in the US.
But these advocates haven’t achieved the widespread dietary changes they’ve sought — and that boosters sometimes claim they have. Despite the claims, 6% of Americans aren’t vegan and vegetarianism hasn’t risen fivefold lately: Gallup polls show a constant 5-6% of Americans have identified as vegetarians since 1999 (Gallup found 2% identified as vegans the only time it asked, in 2012). The one credible poll showing vegetarianism doubling in recent years still found only 5-7% of Americans identifying as vegetarian in 2017 — consistent with the stable Gallup numbers.
Although the cited Gallup report doesn’t explicitly distinguish on immigrant status or ethnicity, it does say that “[a]lmost all segments of the U.S. population have similar percentages of vegetarians” while noting a larger difference in marital status.
As a brief example with easyish math, 15M out of 300M = 5%; 15M out of 330M (adding 30M extra meat eaters) only drops it to ~4.5%. Addition of 30M non-v*gan immigrants would mask an 1,500,000 increase in the number of non-immigrant vegetarians (15M/300M = 5% = 16.5M/330M). Without the 30M immigrants, the vegetarian population would have risen from 5% to 16.5M/300M = 5.5%. Given that the assumption that no immigrants are vegetarian is unrealistic, this shows that adding a good number of meat-eaters to the denominator doesn’t move the percentages much at all.
Open Phil claims that campaigns to make more Americans go vegan and vegetarian haven’t been very successful. But does this analysis account for immigration?
If people who already live in the US are shifting their diets, but new immigrants skew omnivore, a simple analysis could easily miss the former shift because immigration is fairly large in the US.
Source of Open Phil claim at https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/how-can-we-reduce-demand-for-meat/ :
Although the cited Gallup report doesn’t explicitly distinguish on immigrant status or ethnicity, it does say that “[a]lmost all segments of the U.S. population have similar percentages of vegetarians” while noting a larger difference in marital status.
Even if one assumes that almost no immigrants are vegetarian, the rate of immigration isn’t so high as to really move a low percentage very much. As of 2018, there were ~45M people in the US who were born in another country. [https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/]
As a brief example with easyish math, 15M out of 300M = 5%; 15M out of 330M (adding 30M extra meat eaters) only drops it to ~4.5%. Addition of 30M non-v*gan immigrants would mask an 1,500,000 increase in the number of non-immigrant vegetarians (15M/300M = 5% = 16.5M/330M). Without the 30M immigrants, the vegetarian population would have risen from 5% to 16.5M/300M = 5.5%. Given that the assumption that no immigrants are vegetarian is unrealistic, this shows that adding a good number of meat-eaters to the denominator doesn’t move the percentages much at all.