Jacob_Peacock

Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

Effec­tive­ness of a the­ory-in­formed doc­u­men­tary to re­duce con­sump­tion of meat and an­i­mal prod­ucts: three ran­dom­ized con­trol­led experiments

• Jacob_Peacock 16 Mar 2023 7:17 UTC

  32 points

  12 ∶ 0

  on: Re­mind­ing my­self just how awful pain can get (plus, an ex­per­i­ment on my­self)

  (Caveat: Views my own, not my employer’s)
  
  I think this sort of first-hand investigation is potentially pretty valuable. I know Ren discourages folks from conducting similar self-experimentation, but I would be curious to see safe and careful experiments of this bent to understand the impact of deliberate experiences of suffering on moral views. Perhaps a worthwhile task for some empirical ethicists.

• Jacob_Peacock 15 Aug 2023 21:59 UTC

  22 points

  6 ∶ 0

  in reply to: jackva’s comment on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  Hi Jack, thank you for your comment! I largely agree the future prospects of plant-based meat might be quite different from the current prospects and write:

  Important alternatives to the PTC hypothesis might consider the role of future consumers rather than present-day consumers, who have been the focus of this paper. Future consumers might experience a large change in social norms or otherwise shift their preferences toward consuming plant-based rather than animal-based meats. This is a common feature of many animal advocacy theories of change (Delon et al., 2022), and advocates will potentially find it difficult to shift social norms in favor of plant-based meat.

  I specifically do not believe that plant-based meats will necessarily never succeed. However, as noted in Footnote 2, historically, the PTC hypothesis has not been presented or understood as a multi-decade proposition, but a rapid transition driven by the likely false premise that PTC dictate food choice.

  Whether plant-based meat is more promising than other theories of change in the long-run is an open, and, in my opinion, quite difficult, question. I generally think it’s hard to make a strong case for or against any particular animal advocacy theory of change on a 20-100 year time scale. Nor do I think the evidence to favor plant-based meats over other long-term theories of change for animals is all that strong.

  I have lots of more thoughts on long-term prospects of alt proteins and animal advocacy I’d like to write, but that may have to wait for the next paper :) In the interim, if there are particular sources you think make a strong case for plant-based meat in the long-run, I’d be keen to read them!

• Jacob_Peacock 23 Aug 2023 16:58 UTC

  17 points

  6 ∶ 0

  in reply to: BruceF’s comment on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  Hi Bruce, thank you for your response and engagement with the paper over the course of the project.

  However, I don’t think this reply engages with the key arguments I make in the paper.

  Why did GFI initially adopt the PTC paradigm?

  I cite and discuss a number of the studies you mention to support this point in the section The PTC premise. I make four specific critiques of this body of literature—can you address these directly?

  1. These studies generally don’t find PTC to be the top three factors in determining food choice. [Two of the three studies I cite do find PT as the top two factors; however, I think this primarily reflects issue (3). See below.]

  2. The rankings in these studies reflect what people perceive as the most important factors rather than what would actually cause them to change their diets.

  3. The cited studies were designed primarily to investigate the role of a few particular factors in food choice rather than to identify the most important factors. This explains why the studies examine only a handful of factors rather than the myriad influences of food choice.

  4. These studies analyze the average ranking of each factor rather than how individual consumers rank the factors. Interpreting these averages as the preferences of individuals invokes the ecological fallacy: even if PTC were the most important factors on average, this does not imply that individual participants would each rank PTC as most important.

  I’m now aware of the Food Choice Questionnaire literature Chris Bryant is referring to, summarized in Cunha (2018), which addresses critique (3) to some extent, but none of the others. As I’d expect with more factors in play, this study also doesn’t find PT or PTC to be the top factors across 26 country-study pairs: instead, only 35% country-study pairs had PT as the top two factors and none of the pairs had PTC as the top three factors. Addressing (4) in this analysis would likely make the results more pessimistic for PT(C).

  I look forward to Chris’s forthcoming work on the topic; perhaps it will change my mind, especially if it’s able to address (2).

  if we can create products that compete on price and taste, sales will go up quite a lot

  Do you agree that the Malan 2022 field trial may have achieved PT-competitiveness? If so, is that the sort of adoption and displacement rate you expected given PT-competitiveness?

  Our basic view is that price and taste are table stakes—that is, they will be necessary for alt proteins to compete with conventional meat.

  This seems like the “PT is necessary but not sufficient” framing that you and others have recently adopted. Can you explain in some rough sense how much of the effort to cause widespread displacement you think PT-competitiveness represents? (I’m borrowing framing from Abraham Rowe in another comment.) For example, maybe PT-equivalence is only a small (but necessary) part of the puzzle in your view, so represents 5% of the total effort required; or it represents most of the effort, say 85%. If this is meaningful to you, can you give a number that represents your views? If not, can you propose an alternative?

  What links here?

  • Jacob_Peacock's comment on Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat by Jacob_Peacock (14 Sep 2023 6:46 UTC; 4 points)
  • Jacob_Peacock's comment on Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat by Jacob_Peacock (28 Sep 2023 19:44 UTC; 2 points)

• Jacob_Peacock 16 Aug 2023 17:20 UTC

  17 points

  3 ∶ 1

  in reply to: jackva’s comment on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  Thank you, I appreciate the nuance! [Also, I realize it’s a long paper, so I quote some relevant passages, but apologies if you already read them. I figure it might help other folks following our thread as well.]

  1. “One could go away from your piece thinking there is a lot of evidence that should have one update against long-term PTC” Reasonable, although I did try to avoid this and emphasize the results apply to current consumers. So I also agree it “seems not warranted by most of the kind of evidence you cite” and specifically didn’t cite evidence that focused on future prospects to maintain a narrow focus on current prospects. That said, all else equal, I do think a worse current situation is evidence in favor of a worse future situation.

  2. That makes sense! I want to spend more time with those two reports if I have more time to focus on long-term plant-based meat prospects; thanks for pointing me towards them specifically.

  3. Concur.

  4. I think this is probably the crux of the our disagreement :) First, I think the PTC conditions you’re referring to are under-specified as I elaborate here, so it’s hard to refute without knowing specifically what you have in mind for PTC. (In the paper, I tried to focus on particular cases that limit the definitional issues or relied on working definitions that I specifically criticize, like passing blinded taste tests.) Second, I don’t think the sustainable innovations reference class is especially compelling: for example, most people had ~no understanding of CFC in refrigerants and didn’t think they were a basic necessity of a healthy life. Similarly, few people celebrate holidays that explicitly focus on the act of consuming fossil fuels. In contrast:

     People feel a peculiar personal attachment to meat (Graça et al., 2015), believe that meat is necessary for health, feel that meat consumption is socially normative, and perceive meat as a nice and natural component of a healthy diet (Piazza et al., 2015). [And celebrate Thanksgiving where they ritualistically eat a turkey :)]

     Some of my other work has touched on what I think is a more relevant reference class: plant-based analogs to animal products:

     Our research has reviewed estimates of cross-price elasticities between margarine and butter (Mendez et al., 2023) and plant-based and dairy milk (Mendez & Peacock, 2021). The results suggest that behavior might be inconsistent across studies. Many estimates suggest that decreased margarine or plant-based milk prices result in increased consumption of the corresponding animal product (known as complementarity, the opposite of substitution).

  5. “From what we know from other transitions, we know that reaching a state close to PTC explains a lot of the variance in adoption” indeed is the core claim that I don’t think there’s actually much clear evidence on. Attributing causation in these sorts of transitions is very difficult; I try to lay out some of the challenges for PTC in particular the last paragraph here. I’d be interested what evidence supports this claim.

• Jacob_Peacock 25 Aug 2022 4:37 UTC

  17 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Protest move­ments: How effec­tive are they?

  Updated view

  Thank you to James for clarifying some of the points below. 1, 3 and 4 all result from miscommunications in the report that on clarification don’t reflect the authors’ intentions. I think 2 continues to be relevant, and we disagree here.

  I’ve updated towards putting somewhat more credence in parts of the work, although I have other concerns beyond the most glaring ones I flagged here. I’m reticent to get into them here since this comment has a long contextual thread; perhaps I’ll write another comment. I do want to represent my overall view here, which is that I think the conclusions are overconfident given the methods.

  Original comment

  I share other commentator’s enthusiasm for this research area. I also laud the multi-method approach and attempts to quantify uncertainty.

  However, I think severe methodological issues are pervasive unfortunately. Accordingly, I did not update based off this work.

  I’ll list 4 important examples here:

  1. In the literature review, strength of evidence was evaluated based on the number of studies supporting a particular conclusion. This metric is entirely flawed as it will find support for any conclusion with a sufficiently high number of studies. For example, suppose you ran 1000 studies of an ineffective intervention. At the standard false positive rate of p-values below 0.05, we would expect 50 studies with significant results. By the standards used in the review, this would be strong evidence the intervention was effective, despite it being entirely ineffective by assumption.

  2. The work surveying the UK public before and after major protests is extremely susceptible to social desirability, agreement and observer biases. The design of the surveys and questions exacerbates these biases and the measured effect might entirely reflect these biases. Comparison to a control group does not mitigate these issues as exposure to the intervention likely results in differential bias between the two groups.

  3. The research question is not clearly specified. The authors indicate they’re not interested in the effects of a median protest, but do not clarify what sort of protest exactly they are interested in. By extension, it’s not clear how the inclusion criteria for the review reflects the research question.

  4. In this summary, uncertainty is expressed from 0-100%, with 0% indicating very high uncertainty. This does not correspond with the usual interpretation of uncertainty as a probability, where 0% would represent complete confidence the proposition was false, 50% total uncertainty and 100% complete confidence the proposition was true. Similarly, Table 4 neither corresponds to the common statistical meaning of variance nor defines a clear alternative.

  These critiques are based off having spent about 3 hours total engaging in various parts of this research. However, my assessment was far from comprehensive, in part because these issues dissuaded me from investigating further. Given the severity of these issues, I’d expect many more methodological issues on further inspection. I apologize in advance if these issues are addressed elsewhere and for providing such directly negative feedback.

• Jacob_Peacock 13 Jun 2022 13:54 UTC

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: New cause area: bi­valve aquaculture

  I don’t find the case against bivalve sentience that strong, especially for the number of animals potentially involved and the diversity of the 10k bivalve species. (For example, scallops are motile and have hundreds of image-forming eyes—it’d be surprising to me if pain wasn’t useful to such a lifestyle!)

• Jacob_Peacock 21 Mar 2022 19:22 UTC

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: James Özden’s comment on: Effec­tive­ness of a the­ory-in­formed doc­u­men­tary to re­duce con­sump­tion of meat and an­i­mal prod­ucts: three ran­dom­ized con­trol­led experiments

  Thank you taking the time to engage, much appreciated! Forgive my responding quickly and feel free to ask for clarification if I miss anything:

  • Definitely, could be different results with different docs. But ours showed a much stronger effect than the average of similar interventions we found in a previous meta-analysis, suggesting Good for Us is pretty good. It is probably better than Cowspiracy on changing intentions, with longer studies of excerpts of Cowspiracy also finding no effect.

  • Agree especially with your sub-point. We also tried to recruit populations more likely to be effected in Study 3. Also, see sources in my previous point.

  • Maybe but doesn’t seem likely since there wasn’t change in importance of animal welfare or other measures of attitudes. I would generally expect effects to decay over time rather than get stronger; our meta-analysis (weakly) supports this hypothesis in that longer time points showed smaller effects. Usefulness of a 2-3 month time point would mostly depend on attrition in my opinion.

  • I would vote other interventions. Classroom education in colleges and universities seems good as does increasing the availability of plant-based options in food service and restaurants.

Em­piri­cal Re­search in An­i­mal Ad­vo­cacy Jan­uary 2020

• Jacob_Peacock 25 Aug 2022 15:11 UTC

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: James Özden’s comment on: Protest move­ments: How effec­tive are they?

  Thank you for your responses and engagement. Overall, it seems like we agree 1 and 2 are problems; still disagree about 3; and I don’t think I made my point on 4 understood and your explanation raises more issues in my mind. While I think these 4 issues are themselves substantive, I worry they are the tip of an iceberg as 1 and 2 are in my opinion relatively basic issues. I appreciate your offer to pay for further critique; I hope someone is able to take you up on it.

  1. Great, I think we agree the approach outlined in the original report should be changed. Did the report actually use percentage of total papers found? I don’t mean to be pedantic but it’s germane to my greater point: was this really a miscommunication of the intended analysis, or did the report originally intend to use number of papers founds, as it seems to state and then execute on: “Confidence ratings are based on the number of methodologically robust (according to the two reviewers) studies supporting the claim. Low = 0-2 studies supporting, or mixed evidence; Medium = 3-6 studies supporting; Strong = 7+ studies supporting.”

  2. It seems like we largely agree in not putting much weight in this study. However, I don’t think comparisons against a baseline measurement mitigates the bias concerns much. For example, exposure to the protests is a strong signal of social desirability: it’s a chunk of society demonstrating to draw attention to the desirability of action on climate change. This exposure is present in the “after” measurement and absent in the “before” measurement, thus differential and potentially biasing the estimates. Such bias could be hiding a backlash effect.

  3. The issue lies in defining “unusually influential protest movements”. This is crucial because you’re selecting on your outcome measurement, which is generally discouraged. The most cynical interpretation would be that you excluded all studies that didn’t find an effect because, by definition, these weren’t very influential protest movements.

  4. Unfortunately, this is not a semantic critique. Call it what you will but I don’t know what the confidences/​uncertainties you are putting forward mean and your readers would be wrong to assume. I didn’t read the entire OpenPhil report, but I didn’t see any examples of using low percentages to indicate high uncertainty. Can you explain concretely what your numbers mean?

     My best guess is this is a misinterpretation of the “90%” in a “90% confidence interval”. For example, maybe you’re interpreting a 90% CI from [2,4] to indicate we are highly confident the effect ranges from 2 to 4, while a 10% CI from [2.9, 3.1] would indicate we have very little confidence in the effect? This is incorrect as CIs can be constructed at any level of confidence regardless of the size of effect, from null to very large, or the variance in the effect.

     Thank you for pointing to this additional information re your definition of variance; I hadn’t seen it. Unfortunately, it illustrates my point that these superficial methodological issues are likely just the tip of the iceberg. The definition you provide offers two radically different options for the bound of the range you’re describing: randomly selected or median protest. Which one is it? If it’s randomly selected, what prevents randomly selecting the most effective protests, in which case the range would be zero? Etc.

  Lastly, I have to ask in what regard you don’t find these critiques methodological? The selection of outcome measure in a review, survey design, construction of a research question and approach to communicating uncertainty all seem methodological—at least these are topics commonly covered in research methods courses and textbooks.

• Jacob_Peacock 16 Aug 2023 19:24 UTC

  10 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: jackva’s comment on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  Ditto, really appreciate your taking the time to so thoughtfully engage. :) A good day on the Forum! I’ll try to wrap up here as well.

  (a) Thanks for this reference—I wasn’t aware of it! This definitely seems like useful evidence in the right direction and I agree with the XKCD’s comic sentiment. That said, it seems like there are still many possible contingencies where price might be a partial rather than full cause. This seems like a ripe area for further research.

  (b) I agree, my list is incomplete, and these are good considerations. By the same token, I am no expert in clean power, so hadn’t thought about some of these challenges like intermittency. Along the same lines of this issue, focusing only on successful technologies also introduces a bias—for example, I imagine a similar graph as above which included nuclear would tell a different story.

  I also agree there’s evidence to be gleaned from studying other sustainability technologies; we certainly shouldn’t ignore these other transitions. But I would like to see them studied more rigorously and systematically, including positive and negative instances; analogies and disanalogies; and contemporary techniques in causal inference.

• Jacob_Peacock 4 Aug 2020 15:15 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Health Be­hav­ior In­ter­ven­tions Liter­a­ture Review

  Hi Jamie, I’m glad to see this work out and will look forward to reading it in more depth. Congratulations—I’m sure it was hugely labor intensive! In my quick read, I was confused by this point:

  Weaknesses of the health behavior literature, despite decades of research and huge amounts of funding, suggest serious limitations of experimental and observational research in other contexts, such as the farmed animal movement.

  I think this is too pessimistic and somewhat short-term thinking. Instead, I would explain the weakness of the current health behavior literature by a few factors:

  1. Foremost, I think this is a symptom of the extraordinary difficulty of empirical research. It’s simply hard to do high-quality research and we are still very much actively discovering what it means to do high-quality research.

  2. Decades just aren’t that long of a time to spend on a research subject, especially in light of the first point. Many contemporary research questions have been known and unanswered for millenia. For example, we have been studying how to extend human life, largely without success, since ancient times.

  3. Various cultural factors in academia inhibit the conduct of high-quality studies. As a few examples: funders sometimes simply won’t cut a check big enough to fund a single high-quality study, but several smaller lower quality ones; some subfields have simply accepted low-quality study designs as a fact of life and made only modest efforts to improve them; a publish or perish mentality incentives producing many small studies on diverse topics, rather than one high-quality study; and highly powered studies are more likely to return a null result, thus damaging publication prospects.

  Of course, none of these are easy to surmount, but I don’t see reason to give up on trying to conduct high-quality studies, especially with few alternatives available. Which brings me to my second question:

  This makes other types of evidence, such as social movement case studies, relatively more promising.

  To my (limited) understanding, case studies are by and large a type of observational research, since they rely on analyzing the observed outcomes of, for example, a social movement, without intervention. It seems like social movement case studies are then limited generally, like most observational research, to understanding correlations and motivating causal theories about those correlations, rather than measuring causation itself. Furthermore, case studies are usually regarded as low-quality evidence and form the base of the evidence pyramid in epidemiology. As such, I’m not sure how the difficulty of collecting high-quality evidence then implies we should collect more of what is usually regarded as low-quality evidence.

  This also seems like a rather broad proclamation about the usefulness of experimental and observational studies—have you considered the merits of regression discontinuity designs, instrumental variables estimation, propensity score matching and prospective cohort studies, for example? All of these seem like designs worth considering for EAA research but don’t seem broadly explored either here or in Sentience Institute’s foundational question “EAA RCTs v intuition/​speculation/​anecdotes v case studies v external findings”.

• Jacob_Peacock 9 Nov 2018 15:28 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: Mea­sur­ing Change in Diet for An­i­mal Advocacy

  Thank you for your thoughtful questions, Aaron!

  1. I don’t know of any existing funding opportunities, although I’d say more research with non-self-reported dietary outcomes would be worthwhile and volunteer researchers with the appropriate skills could certainly be involved there. Volunteers with connections at colleges, universities, restaurants or grocery stores could also be valuable for building collaborations. There may also be as-of-yet undiscovered allies in advocating for transparency in the food system, perhaps among groups fighting obesity or generally supporting public health.

  2. I did some research on personal food tracking, specifically food diaries where people track their consumption. I think reactivity is the most significant problem: keeping a food diary in itself has been demonstrated as an effective weight loss strategy (p6 Thompson and Subar 2013). That said, keeping a food diary could be interesting to explore as an intervention of its own right. For measurement, however, there has been less validation work on food diaries, likely because they are so onerus to participants, causing noncompliance and dropout. Using an existing population tracking their diets would be prone to selection bias since participants are likely already health conscious. Recording photos of food, rather than written diaries, is also being explored and may mitigate reactivity by requiring less work from participants, although subsequently analyzing the photos may prove challenging. (“Pledging a meat-free month: An experience sampling study with smartphones” https://​​researchfund.animalcharityevaluators.org/​​funded-projects/​​)

Mea­sur­ing Change in Diet for An­i­mal Advocacy

• Jacob_Peacock 9 Dec 2019 18:09 UTC

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The In­di­vi­d­ual and the Bathwater

  I don’t think anyone is suggesting shifting “most of the resources” (Jacy only suggests 50% of existing individual resources) and certainly not all resources, so I don’t think the “and” not “or” message is really relevant. Of course, if there are people who hold this view I’d be curious to learn more. I think the question for most is identifying the optimal ratio. Sentience Institute is also quite clear on the evidence underlying that belief and it’s not a lack of a link between advocacy and diet, but the existence of more public support for institutional change, historical precedent and psychological arguments. For what it’s worth I also believe we need some balance between the two, as Harish Sethu wrote about at Labs.

  I appreciate your pointing out that many institutional approaches have “even less real-world empirical support.” As you know, The Humane League Labs is actively working to rectify this :) However, one might object that in the history of social change, institutional approaches have significantly more empirical support, at least in so far as few if any social movements seem to have succeeded by convincing each individual to their cause. I think there is still work to be done marshalling this evidence and I’m not convinced the existing evidence is applicable to animal advocacy. But I nonetheless find this evidence (the history of social change) more convincing than not in support of institutional approaches (maybe 60% credence).

  I am also concerned that it’s not clear what individual efforts you’re suggesting. At least in the US, attitudes and intentions towards animals seem quite good:

  • Animal Tracker finds 68% of US adults “Strongly” or “Somewhat support” “the animal protection movement’s goal to minimize and eventually eliminate all forms of animal cruelty and suffering.”

  • Gallup finds 32% of people agree that “Animals deserve the exact same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation”, while another 62% agree “Animals deserve some protection from harm and exploitation, but it is still appropriate to use them for the benefit of humans”. Separately, 64% support “passing strict laws concerning the treatment of farm animals”.

  • Sentience Institute finds 54% of people agree with “I am currently trying to consume fewer animal-based foods (meat, dairy, and/​or eggs) and more plant-based foods (fruits, grains, beans, and/​or vegetables).” and 49% agree with “I support a ban on the factory farming of animals.”

  These numbers could certainly be higher, but overall they seem decent and have been at least somewhat validated with the success of state-level legislation passed at the poll. Of course, the attitude-behavior and citizen-consumer gaps mean attitudes and intentions don’t necessarily translate to other behavior changes, like reduced animal product consumption or choosing cage-free over caged eggs. But to me, this suggests we need to focus on measuring and changing the behaviors we’re interested in, rather than the attitudes and intentions that don’t translate.

  More broadly, I agree with a commenter elsewhere that this discussion seems to focus primarily on corporate animal welfare campaigns when there are many other institutional avenues to consider.

  (Lastly, at the risk of nit picking on a very minor note in the intro, but social sciences like economics and political science often consider institutions, so I’m not sure social science necessarily inclines one toward the individual.)

  What links here?

  • EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for Novem­ber 2019 by Aaron Gertler (16 Jan 2020 0:56 UTC; 26 points)

• Jacob_Peacock 22 Aug 2023 16:11 UTC

  8 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jack_S’s comment on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  Hi Jack, thanks for your comment and so thoroughly checking my sources!

  I agree with your interpretation of Szejda. I intended to cite this study with regards to the PTC premise—that PTC primarily determine food choice—not the PTC hypothesis in full (that PTC-competitive PBM would largely displace animal-based meat).

  However, I don’t agree that no one holds this view. I’d refer to three lines of evidence:

  1. Direct textual evidence. In particular, I think the main source I cite is pretty clear cut:

  the hypothesis proposes that plant-based meat “can compete on the basis of price, taste, and convenience, and just remove animals from the equation altogether” (Anderson, 2019).

  I also don’t quite see your points played out in the other two main sources I cite. That said, it has been a while since I read them cover-to-cover, so if there are passages you think conflict with those I cited, I’d welcome them :) Here are the other two main citations.

  When we’re thinking about what it is that we want to eat, every single one of us thinks about the price of the food, we think about how it’s going to taste. We may not be thinking about convenience but convenience is going to be a central factor. [...] We want to actually create plant-based alternatives and clean meat alternatives to conventional animal agriculture that compete on the basis of those factors and shift the world away from industrialized animal agriculture”(Cargill & Wiblin, 2018).

  Despite rising awareness of the global impacts of our dietary choices, consumers continue to base their purchasing decisions primarily on price, taste, and convenience. Quite simply, reducing animal protein consumption is intractable for most people due to a lack of appetizing and affordable products that could serve as alternatives to conventional animal protein products. The challenge, then, is to innovate and bring to market diverse protein alternatives that are as delicious, price-competitive, and convenient as animal-derived food products are currently. By making healthy and sustainable alternative proteins comparable to conventional proteins in the areas of flavor, price, and ubiquity, alternative proteins become the default choice” (GFI Research Program, 2019, pp. 4–5).

  1. “Other researchers offer similar descriptions of the PTC hypothesis (Anthis, 2018; Kankyoku, 2022).” So there’s at least a perception among other researchers as well that some people hold these views.

  2. My anecdotal experience since publishing the paper. I’ve received comments from both people who ~believed the PTC hypothesis and from people who agree the view is prevalent. Similarly, see other posts in this thread agreeing that this view is widespread. (Noting that Abraham Rowe and I both work at Rethink Priorities.)

  What links here?

  • BruceF's comment on Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat by Jacob_Peacock (4 Sep 2023 8:08 UTC; 28 points)

• Jacob_Peacock 16 Aug 2023 16:47 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Joseph Lemien’s comment on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  Thanks for your question—forgive my quoting from the paper in response, I understand it’s quite lengthy! To your first question, I don’t think most interpretations of the PTC hypothesis would qualify tempeh as taste-equivalent (although, as I emphasize here, these factors aren’t very well defined).

  I’ve included a case study on hot dogs specifically:

  the home-goods-retailer-cum-cafeteria Ikea sells plant-based hotdogs that are equally or lower-priced, readily available alongside animal-based hot dogs, and “received a 95 percent approval rating” in taste testing in Sweden (Webber, 2019). In September 2019, Ikea’s plant-based hot dogs composed about 8% of annual hot dog sales globally (Southey, 2019).[4]

  My rough guesses on changes over time:

  Important alternatives to the PTC hypothesis might consider the role of future consumers rather than present-day consumers, who have been the focus of this paper. Future consumers might experience a large change in social norms or otherwise shift their preferences toward consuming plant-based rather than animal-based meats. This is a common feature of many animal advocacy theories of change (Delon et al., 2022), and advocates will potentially find it difficult to shift social norms in favor of plant-based meat.

  Happy to answer follow-ups :)

• Jacob_Peacock 1 Apr 2022 15:11 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: I feel anx­ious that there is all this money around. Let’s talk about it

  I agree, pricing in impact seems reasonable. But do you think this is currently happening? if so, by what mechanism? I think the discrepancies between Redwood and ACE salaries are much more likely explained by norms at the respective orgs and funding constraints rather than some explicit pricing of impact.

• Jacob_Peacock 7 Nov 2023 17:48 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Price-, Taste-, and Con­ve­nience-Com­pet­i­tive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Cur­rently Re­place Meat

  I’ve made some updates and corrections to this paper—(2) and (3) are most important in my opinion and make the Malan 2022 field experiment a somewhat weaker test of the PTC hypothesis. Thanks to all who commented!

  Changes are noted below (which I’ve also added to the post):

  1. Correction to Figure 1 to indicate Ikea 2019 data represent all stores globally, rather than just the United States.

  Corrections and updates in the “Malan 2022 field experiment” section:

  1. Replace “On Thursdays, students had the option of receiving prepared burritos with either Impossible ground beef, animal-based steak, or veggies, while the build-your-own entree line offered Impossible ground beef every day alongside animal-based ground beef.” with “On Thursdays, students had the option of receiving prepared burritos with either Impossible ground beef, animal-based cubed steak, or veggies, while the build-your-own entree line offered Impossible ground beef every day alongside animal-based cubed steak, shredded beef and other animal products.”

  2. Replace the second paragraph in this section. Briefly, this updates and corrects the text to indicate that a negligible portion of participants did pay for meals; an animal-based ground beef equivalent to the Impossible ground beef was not served; and dining hall staff served all food. Furthermore, it adds information on a survey of participants’ perception of the taste of Impossible ground beef. The paragraph previously read:

     In this study, price is entirely equivalent since students pay for dining hall access for the entire semester, not individual meals. With regards to taste, Impossible ground beef specifically has not been subjected to any public taste tests. However, as reviewed above, the Impossible Burger, which is made of similar ingredients, has been found to taste equivalent in some studies. The study does not describe exactly the form of the beef in the steak burrito, making its taste equivalence less certain but probably still a reasonable inference. For the ground beef served on the build-your-own entree line, taste equivalence seems very likely. We can further surmise that the Impossible ground beef meals in the study were at least desirable: a follow-up survey found that 71% of purchasers were repeat purchasers (Malan, 2020, p. 189). Convenience is likely equivalent as well since the burritos are prepared for students by dining hall staff, and the build-your-own entree line is self-serve for both animal- and plant-based ground beef.

     It now reads:

     In this study, price is almost always equivalent since students pay for dining hall access for the entire semester, not individual meals; a negligible proportion of meals were purchased with other means of payment. With regards to taste, Impossible ground beef is not directly comparable to either the cubed steak or shredded beef served in the study, nor has it been subjected to any public taste tests comparing it with ground beef. However, as reviewed above, the Impossible Burger, which is made of similar ingredients, has been found to taste equivalent to ground beef burgers in some studies. Furthermore, Malan (2020) includes a survey on taste perceptions of 215 participants at the intervention site, although some of the question phrasing might evoke slight agreement or social desirability bias, and the survey may be affected by selection bias. Of the 96 surveyed participants who self-selected to try the Impossible ground beef, 86% agreed or somewhat agreed it was delicious; 85% that Impossible ground beef “is a satisfying alternative to animal meat” (Malan, 2020, Table 20); and 71% choose to eat it more than once (Malan, 2020, p. 189). Of the 89 open-ended responses describing what was liked about the Impossible ground beef, 52% mentioned the flavor, feel or texture and 30% its similarity to animal-based meat (Malan, 2020, Table 27). Conversely, of the 49 open-ended responses on what was disliked, 29% mentioned the flavor or feel and 24% the texture (Malan, 2020, Table 28). Given these results it may be reasonable to conclude the Impossible ground beef was fairly well-liked among those participants who consumed it, although it is not equivalent to the other beef products offered. Finally, convenience is likely equivalent since all meals are prepared for students by dining hall staff.

  3. Replace “Dining halls were not randomized to intervention and control status, and participants were free to cross over between dining halls during the study, both factors that could bias effects in either direction. Control dining hall A was adjacent to the intervention dining hall, so intervention materials were potentially visible, while control dining hall B was isolated from the intervention.” with “Dining halls were not randomized to intervention and control status, and participants were known to cross over between dining halls (Malan et al., 2022, p. 226), both factors that could bias effects in either direction. Control dining hall A was adjacent to the intervention dining hall, and some intervention materials were thus visible (Malan, 2020, p. 119), while control dining hall B was isolated from the intervention.”

  Clarifications and a correction in the “Conclusions & recommendations” section:

  1. Clarify “The underlying premise of PTC as the key determinants of food choice is not supported by evidence from cross-sectional surveys on consumers’ self-reported determinants.”

  2. Correct “Finally, a controlled experiment introducing high-quality plant-based meat to a dining hall—at almost always equal price and convenience to animal-based meat—shows that most participants did not choose plant-based meat.”

  3. Correction to replace “six” with “five” in “Across five lines of evidence, it is clear that the empirical evidence opposes the PTC hypothesis.”