rossaokod
This is really excellent Jess—thanks for writing it up! I think I have been thinking about things in a very similar way, and strongly identify with pretty much everything you say!
I started trying out a transition to being (mostly) vegan in September last year, as I thought a move to being 100% vegan straight away would be very difficult (I think most of the costs are ‘transition’ costs and decrease as you form new habits and learn more about stuff to buy). I have been surprised at how painless it has been, but have not yet tried being 100% vegan.
At the moment, I think about 85% of my meals are vegan (and the rest vegetarian) - I try to count the non-vegan ones each week. I think you need a clear rule to do this, and I have been using something very similar to what you suggest. I no longer buy animal products at the supermarket, so everything I eat or prepare at home is vegan. But if I am out, or at a seminar/event where there is free food provided and there is no vegan option, I eat vegetarian. I also allow vegetarian eating when I am travelling, or at other people’s houses. Most weeks this leads to roughly 3⁄21 non-vegan meals, but obviously this is a lot higher if I am travelling.
The way I see this is getting from 85% to 100% is probably the most costly part for me (most inconvenience, most social cost) and I am getting the vast majority of the benefit with very little of the cost. I do feel uncomfortable with that 15% though. I think I will continue until September, and then reasses after a year, maybe getting closer to 100% with new rules.
This Economics paper find a significant positive effect of celebrity endorsements on book sales—just some more evidence that this works!
Garthwaite, Craig L. 2014. “Demand Spillovers, Combative Advertising, and Celebrity Endorsements.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 6(2): 76-104
Thanks for writing this up! I think this type of research is very important in the animal advocacy movement.
One thing I would like to see in one of these studies is using food purchase data instead of relying on surveys. This might be possible in colleges/universities where a large proportion of students have some sort of meal plan, and pay for their food using their student ID or some other similar card. In some places the students just pay to enter a food hall, and so you wouldn’t know what food they ate, but in other places I think each item is scanned individually. This approach would obviously require the university and/or food service company being supportive of this type of work, and being willing to share the data. They would of course also have to anonymize the data and it might be a challenge getting ethics approval.
I see two main benefits of this type of data. (1) it is likely much more accurate than survey data and (2) you are likely to have far more power in your statistical tests. There are a few reasons I believe (2): there would be less noise in the data (i.e. even if self reports are unbiased, they will likely have measurement error), you would likely have a larger sample size (no problems with response rates), and you could use continuous measures of meat consumption (i.e. ‘number of food items bought with meat over a week/month’ rather than just ‘do you eat meat?’)