The methods of the paper just don’t bear any useful relationship to the real world.
this was a survey, not a real pilot where people had to actually spend real money, or had a choice as to whether or not to go to the shop. They could ‘decline to order’ and notably this was higher in the no PBMA arm.
The veggie option in this instance was just the same as the other options without any protein added (albeit ‘free guac’). Arguing therefore that people choosing the Plant-based meat one are ‘forgoing veggies’ is incorrect, if the orders had been real, they would have just had the veggie wrap plus plant protein.
Even if we assume this survey is a reasonable reflection of real world behaviour, the main thing that jumps out to me is that you can force vegetarians to spend the same amount of money on a wrap that has less in because they are a captive audience, and when you add plant protein, some of those people prefer to have plant-based protein in.
The most leveraged audience to target with meat reduction is those on board but struggling, not random people out of the blue. Plant-based meat shows clear utility in this, and this study doesn’t really undermine that proposition in my view.
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.