Hi @matthes, I appreciate your writing this post and agree with much of it. Thank you for recommending my article as well. I wanted to note I updated it for publication (preprint) earlier this year. In line with your thesis, little new evidence has been produced recently, so there wasn’t much to update.
I did add a section on the effects of reducing alt protein prices, which gently pushes back against your framing that “alternative proteins are unlikely to cause harm”:
Price changes [of alternative proteins] might seem to have the most straightforwardly favorable case: decreases in plant-based meat analogue prices presumably lead to more sales and, consequently, less animal-based meat sales. However, this is not guaranteed. For example, a lower price may lead some consumers to treat plant-based meat analogues as inferior goods—or cheap substitutes—rather than a better deal.
Reviewing cross-price elasticity studies of plant-based meats, milks and butters, I conclude: “Throughout, estimates sometimes suggested that decreased plant-based meat, butter and milk analogue prices might cause increased consumption of the corresponding animal product.” Obviously, this is pretty counter-intuitive, but such is the evidence at present, in my opinion. We elaborate on the difficulties of interpreting this evidence in our review of butter cross-price elasticities.
Writing in my personal capacity. Abhi and I have also discussed the possibility of working together on this topic.
I appreciate your engaging with my review of alt proteins. I agree that taste is somewhat underspecified there. One challenge I ran into is that proponents of improving taste don’t often specify exactly how they think taste equivalence should be operationalized. I tried to cover the range of operationalizations for which I could find evidence, but ended up focusing primarily on human taste tests rather than analytical chemical evidence. My reasoning was twofold. First, taste tests measure taste experience most directly and address the extent to which differences can be perceived. Second, in practice they capture not only gustatory taste, but also texture, aroma, and other sensory characteristics that are often bundled together when people talk about “taste equivalence.”
I’m curious about your comment that these studies are “arguably underpowered.” Do you mean that, for example, the confidence intervals in the NECTAR taste tests are too wide to support meaningful conclusions about hedonic taste equivalence? Or are you pointing to something else?
Having only recently started looking more closely at the analytical chemistry literature, I have a few tentative thoughts:
Some operationalizations in this space seem quite demanding. Meat contains an enormous number of compounds (likely millions/billions), so demonstrating equivalence across all (or even most) of them may be difficult. Restricting attention to flavor-relevant compounds above perceptual thresholds would help, though that also raises the issue of measuring those thresholds for many compounds.
More broadly, I’m not yet convinced that this level of chemical equivalence is the right target. It seems plausible that there is a fairly large space of flavors consumers would find highly appealing, even if many do not closely resemble conventional meat. This seems especially plausible given that consumers themselves have only sampled a small fraction of the possible flavor space even within animal products.
In any case, analytical chemistry would also need to be complemented by measures of texture and mouthfeel. That’s not necessarily an objection, but it does make the overall evaluation more involved.
On cross-price elasticity, I agree it isn’t generally intended to predict long-run changes in market share unless the underlying demand structure remains stable while prices change—a fairly strong assumption. As you say, predicting these dynamics is hard. That said, given the current evidence on cross-price elasticities for alt proteins—including some apparently conflicting findings about whether lower prices increase or decrease meat consumption—I’m not sure I have strong intuitions about how a long-run prediction follows from that data. For beef/chicken cross-price elasticity estimates, is there a particular reference you have in mind?
Overall, I’m glad to see this RFP: as you know, I agree there’s substantial value in better measuring and improving alt protein taste, and I’m looking forward to seeing more work in this area.