Hi! I’m a final year undergraduate student at Trinity College Dublin studying Theoretical Physics. I’m primarily interested in animal advocacy as of now, though I’m open to other cause areas too.
Oisín Considine
The Plant-Based Universities open letter has now gone public
I’m so glad you have written this piece and posted it in the EA Forum. I have been diagnosed with ADHD for almost a year now and almost everything you have expressed above resonated with me. There seem to be surprisingly few posts in the EA Forum which describe or take into account the experience of having ADHD.
My curiosity coupled with ADHD has led me to have surface-level knowledge in a wide range of topics and areas but not having much in-depth knowledge about any one particular area. I have always felt like although I really want to dedicate my life to doing as much good in the world as I can, I don’t like work that is hard and not immediately rewarding and I cannot maintain medium/long-term projects to be able to contribute in a meaningful way. I often would get a sudden burst of motivation in a particular area and I’m feeling great and researching into it, but then after a while I lose that motivation and I gravitate either to mindless procrastination or to whatever my new motivation is, and I don’t go back. I feel like, after a year and a half lurking on the EA Forum, I want to actually (actively) do something, but the above obstacles have prevented me from doing much more than reading some short Forum posts and bookmarking a load of ones that look interesting to me but which I never actually get down to reading.
I have also been a particularly unfortunate case when it comes to medication (I’ve tried 3 different drugs, 2 different dosages of each, and none have worked for me thus far).
Is it possible to edit the title so it says “Deadline June 5th” instead of “Deadline 6/5″ as many people who could potentially be interested in this might look at the title and think the deadline was the 6th of May and thus scroll past the post? Most of the world uses the DD/MM/YY (sometimes also YY/MM/DD) format, so I would imagine that this small change could help a lot and attract more potential applicants.
This seems like a really fantastic opportunity and it would be a great pity if some were to ignore it who otherwise would have been interested in applying simply because they misinterpreted the deadline as being the 6th of May instead of the 5th of June.
I’m not sure about whether or not some university canteens have asked to remove red meat, but I know that some of the universities which were successful, voted to implement something like 60/70% plant-based catering for the next year, with an increase of 10% each year until they get to 100% to make it more gradual.
Also, even if a university agreed to remove red meat, I still believe this is a more positive move in the long run, even taking this substitution effect into account (though of course I could be wrong as I have no concrete evidence). Just shifting away from red meat (even if not fully/partially replaced with plant-based food) could provide a bit of a momentum boost in bringing about institutional climate action regarding food systems change, and could encourage other universities to go even further and try for fully plant-based. Also it could give campaigners at the now red-meatless university a foot-in-the-door to go further and push for the removal of all animal products. Removing red meat could also get people thinking about the food/drink they consume when thinking about climate change. Of course, all this can provide a bridge for other issues which animal agriculture exacerbates to become gradually more mainstream too. However, yes there could definitely be (short-term) downsides to a university removing just red meat (and further downsides if the removal of red meat was what was initially campaigned for, though even this still has many positives).
In relation to the proportion of students who would/would not be in favour of this, the most I could find for now are the percentage votes for and against the motion in some of the universities in which a vote was held. As far as I am aware, along with University College London, Queen Mary University of London and Universities of Cambridge, Kent, Stirling and Birmingham (all at which the motion was passed), votes for the motion were also held (which failed) at Universities of Edinburgh and Warwick. I could only find data on the votes at Warwick (846 total votes, 320 (38%) for, 497 (59%) against, 29 (3%) abstentions),[1] Cambridge (total vote unknown, 55% for, 21% against, 24% abstentions),[2] UCL (total vote unknown, 75% “for” in general vote, 86% “for” in SU executive meeting)[3] and Birmingham (total vote unknown, 54% for).[4] Also in Kent, although I don’t have any exact figures to hand, the vote for the motion (which passed) had the highest voter turnout (over 450) for any Kent Union election in the university’s history.[5]
There was also a YouGov poll which found that 55% of students want more plant-based options at their university, and it also showed that 47% of students were either flexitarian, pescetarian, vegetarian or vegan and that 49% would like to eat less meat and/or dairy (I can find these articles (here and here) which mention these results, yet I can’t seem to find the raw published data or the survey results themselves, though I could have simply missed them). And one YouGov survey (December 2022) showed that 31% of 18-24 year-old Britons described themselves either flexitarian, pescatarian, vegetarian or vegan (53% described themselves as a meat-eater, and 15% as none of the above), and 12% of non-vegans of this age category would like to attempt Veganuary (going vegan for the month of January) in 2023.[6]
Additionally, I found this interesting study (summary) which investigated the consumer effects of university dining halls serving plant-based meals as the default option. It studied three US universities (Tulane University, Lehigh University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). It found that
On Control Days, only 26.9% of dishes served were plant-based. In comparison, on Plant Default Days, 57.6% of dishes served were plant-based. At Tulane and Lehigh, the proportion of plant-based dishes served on Plant Default Days jumped to 81.5%
and
We calculate that food-related greenhouse gas emissions declined by 23.6% on Plant Default Days.
They also say that spillover effect is also taken into account, whereby a proportion of students who would have visited an intervention station on a Control Day decided to avoid the intervention station on a Plant Default Day in search of meat options elsewhere in the dining hall.
Other key findings of this study include:
With incorrect implementation, the impact of the default on dish choice vanishes
Students—including meat eaters—are open to plant-based options
Dining hall staff found a plant-based default easy—and enjoyable—to implement
Eating and serving meat continues to be the social norm in campus dining, despite openness by students and staff to shift toward plant-forward choices, which indicates a considerable untapped opportunity for effective interventions, like defaults, to change consumption behaviour[7]
So I guess that yeah there may be some who would be disgruntled about this but the last study mentioned (which was partly commissioned by Sodexo North America by the way), shows that students—including meat eaters—were significantly more likely to express satisfaction with plant-based meals on days when plant-based meals were the default. And Sodexo have also publicly committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by making its college campus planned menus 50% plant-based by 2025.[8] So I do believe that shifting behaviour on an institutional level can force a shift in behaviour on an individual level in the same or a similar direction.
I’d also include this mindmap focused on suffering ethics and s-risks (sorry idk how to shorten URLs on my phone):
(Source website: https://suffering-abolition.github.io/)
Hi everyone, I am Oisín from Ireland. I am relatively new to EA (about 4 months), and am currently in university studying Theoretical Physics (3rd year), though I’m pretty sure I won’t graduate with a first to be quite honest. The general field of EA I would currently be most invested in is animal welfare/advocacy. I am also in the middle of the AAC training course and finding it intruiging. Would you know how someone with my sort of degree could be useful in EAA (effective animal advocacy) or other areas of EA? Thanks for all the advice
Hi Dermot, I’m Oisín. Are you aware of Ireland’s EA chapter, EA Éire? I’m part of it myself, so if you’d like and if you are not already part of it, I can get you added to the EA Éire WhatsApp groupchat. Also we have some meetups in Dublin (some in Cork too I think for those down south) so you’d be welcome to join us. One of the organisers has actually written a syllabus for and run a proto-biosecurity fellowship in the past, so you could probably talk to him about that a bit more about pandemic prevention stuff I’d say. Anyways, welcome to the EA community!
Yeah all the better that you did! It can only help.
I used the Brussels Effect in the context of the Plant-Based Universities campaign to demonstrate how a university or universities in a particular region transitioning to a fully plant-based catering system would encourage other universities to follow suit at least partly due to wanting to maintain a forward-looking and innovative image and reputation which makes them appear more attractive. However, I admit that I didn’t fully understand the true nature of the Brussels Effect when I first wrote the post, and now after reading back over my post, particularly the part mentioning the Brussels Effect which you highlighted, and after understanding more about how this effect has less of a reputational factor and more of an economical factor which plays the role in encouraging change, I believe that mentioning it has no real use here. I was a little bit naive in the way in which I used (or perhaps misused) the term, so thank you for pointing this out to me. I take your point into due consideration and I have now edited that sentence out. Nevertheless my point about a university/universities going plant-based indirectly encouraging others to follow them due to factors including wanting to maintain a certain image/attractiveness, as well as the inertia of the movement itself, stands as is.
The aim of the initiative is to get all university catering services to transition to serving 100% plant-based options, so the plan is to remove beef and chicken, along with all other animal-based food/drink products
Currently I see that GWWC is registered in the US, UK and the Netherlands, and there exist country-specific regranting organisations in 11 other countries where one can also avail of some sort of local tax deduction. Do you plan on (if you are able to) expanding the number of countries whose donors can avail of tax deductions, either by getting GWWC registered in those countries or by helping to set up, or link to GWWC, regranting organisations in more countries?