I write about meat reduction research at https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/ and here’s an overview of the lab I work at
Seth Ariel Green 🔸
Karma: 1,740
Four remarks.
Vasile gives the paper I worked on a fair overview, and indeed Maya’s previous paper found very different results. Your milage may vary, data are inherently messy, etc. Personally I think that attitude/intention change is much easier than behavior change, and the core difference between the papers is that the more recent paper focuses exclusively on consumption. 9 of the 10 largest effects in the Mathur 2021 meta are attitudinal or intentional, if I recall. (This is a general problem in behavioral research.)
Kramer and Landry measure outcomes a week later. the context of this being a ‘great’ paper is that almost no one else has even accomplished that, at least not with an RCT with high implementation fidelity. But Peter and Lisa would be the first to say that a week is not the long-term measurement they want.
Like Lewis, I find it a lot easier to think about what should happen on the margin rather than what everyone everywhere should do. I think that evaluating diet change and persuasion efforts is a good use of my time because I think there are a bunch of interesting questions that have yet to be asked in a research context. The meta helped identify them.
I have never felt excluded from EA for my interest in diet change and persuasion. If anything the opposite, folks love taking about this at EAGs and such. The difference, if I might flatter myself, is that my work is consistent with EA epistemic, communication, and knowledge-sharing norms. A lot of advocacy is not.
Apropos of Maxime’s Crunch Time is Now. Drop Everything, I wonder if folks who think AI is reasonably likely to kill us all have a clear set of things that, if they saw them, would lead them to say “I was wrong, AI is not an existential threat” or even “I was right, thank goodness we acted and AI is no longer an existential threat.” I don’t see AI as likely to kill us all, and so long as I die of natural causes, or if I live longer than a natural lifespan in some kind of post-singularity bliss, I will easily be able to say, AI wasn’t so bad after all. Is there a mirror image to that? A set of “I was wrong to be a doomer” conditions?
From a quick scan, many prominent AI critics have conditions that would lead them to say, it’s now safe to move forward, but very little in the “I was wrong” category. I suppose it’s hard to prove a negative—“this is no longer a threat”—but I’m curious how folks think about this.
Ah, so from this and a now-deleted sister comment I am learning that I don’t understand Renaissance very well. (Or rather that I clicked “About” instead of “Our Work”)
Hi Bruce, I know those studies reasonably well:
We reviewed the Turnwald et al. piece for our MAP reduction meta but didn’t end up including it because it measures vegetable consumption rather than reduced meat consumption and I’m never clear on how to translate between those outcomes.
We reviewed Bacon & Krpan as well and excluded for its online/hypothetical outcomes.
I think your read on both papers is accurate. I just don’t accord them very much weight in my models of what reduces meat consumption. However, BITE is a big believer in tasty titles to promote plant-based options, as I’m sure you know. In general I do think labels matter (e.g. Berke 2023).
Yep, and I knew this because (like you) I am (arguably something of) an insider. but if you don’t happen to know this—well actually I just googled it and indeed Ikea shows up. So I guess a curious person can sometimes get to the bottom of this 😃
I would like for people who are giving away money to tell us where the money comes from.
BluePerch “is a new animal welfare grantmaker” planning to give away several million dollars. Great! Where does that money come from? Who is the donor or group of donors? Their EA post does not say, and neither does their website.
Tilt Collective supports “efforts that improve access to nutritious, affordable, sustainable food and build on local agricultural knowledge.” Their hiring page says they are a “a philanthropic initiative that advances a balanced food system.” Their twitter was last updated in 2024. Their homepage features a report, a TED talk, and nothing else. Every year, they put on a Climate Week event called Food Day, which they’re currently promoting on LinkedIn. (The food was very good there last year and the whole thing had signs of being well-funded.) Other than that, there’s no mention of programs supported, where the money comes from, or how they make decisions about whom to support.
Renaissance Philanthropy, same story.
You might think, it’s their money, they can do with it what they please, and very wealthy people have good reasons to want privacy. To which I say:
A core lesson of FTX is to be cautious about whom you take money from and how you relate to them. Like Gus says on The Wire, “Maybe you win a Pulitzer behind this stuff. And maybe you gotta give it back.”
Obscurity helps insiders navigate and keeps everyone else out. I prefer legibility and egalitarian systems, which I think are more consistent with EA values.
I agree with both points here. A few general thoughts, echoing something I wrote in 2022.
Very hard for an outsider to assess whether someone is likely to be good at a job. I generally don’t like to second guess other people’s hiring decisions.
There are extreme cases where I’d second guess anyone. SBF is obviously a psychopath and hiring him would be insane. Likewise, there are cases when you don’t hire the (narrowly conceived) ‘best’ person for the job. I would never hire Diddy to promote a party or produce a track, for instance.
I don’t think Caroline is such a case. I view her as a cautionary tale about getting sucked into the orbit of a charismatic psychopath when you’re a young person. I’ll never know what I would have done in her shoes. For what it’s worth, I once applied to be SBF’s friend in the Bahamas because it was advertised on the EA forum.
If Caroline were hired at CG or CEA or a few other orgs, I’d be worried about reputational harms. Manifund is much more marginal than that. I think reputational harms will be commensurately marginal.
One version of this point is to note that EA’s critics are looking for anything to pounce on because we’re a bunch of weirdos, and Austin’s reasoning about this is definitely weird (as in ‘unusual’ rather than ‘bad’, whereas for some folks, these two senses of the word are indistinguishable). It is unbecoming and ignoble to live in fear of what one’s least generous adversaries might say.
Another version of this point is that many EAs believe very deeply in the power of ideas and thus are worried about second order effects of stating/living one’s ideas, such as reputational harms and infohazards. I think these concerns are largely overblown. I think they make too much of our own importance and the extent to which people are paying attention to us whatsoever.
Having said that, I think a mocking headline about this hire is likely. (But where? NYPost? Current Affairs? Wired? Sierra Club? London Review of Books? Our haters are an ideologically rich array. A real cosmic gumbo, you might say.)
The strong feelings this post inspires suggests that the FTX trauma has not fully healed. I wonder if EAGs should have like, sessions or something where people who were affected by it can grieve together. Weren’t we all?
Ah, apologies, should have clicked your profile.
Yes, my/our lab’s work is funded by Coefficient and by the Strategic Anima Funding Circle, and my blog is funded through Coefficient’s Living Literature Review program.
Some other EA-flavored research we’ve produced (and sometimes reported here):
Research report: adding a plant-based option (or two) doesn’t change behavior
Research report: modern alternative proteins did not replace meat purchases in restaurants
Documentary films can increase public interest in plant-based diets in the USA
Adjacent to our work, Kenny Torella of Vox writes about a randomized evaluation of the documentary Dominion (Kramer & Landry 2026) & I talk to James Ozden about the limits of behavioral approaches on his podcast How I learned to Love Shrimp.
All of this, I think, is circling around questions of persuasion and talking to people about meat.
Finally, it’s simply true that eating animals entails paying for abuse so extreme that almost everyone is repulsed by it.
But as far as I’m aware, we have no one with an EA mindset focused on how we make these arguments most effectively
👋 I and many others are working on this! See, eg, Meaningfully reducing meat consumption is an unsolved problem: meta-analysis. We write such papers with the goal of figuring out what strategy works best for talking to people about factory farming.
P.s. Welcome to the forum Bruce, hope it’s a good experience.
I strongly disagree with the concern about reputational damage. Vasco is not the spokesperson for EA. He should ask the questions he thinks interesting and important. Other people can engage or not as they see fit. The situation might be different if he occupied a structurally important role in the movement—head of CEA? -- but even then, I’d want him to pursue his version of sapere aude, daring to know. Rationalist epistemic norms are good and worth preserving.
I am reminded of something @Aidan Kankyoku wrote about worrying about infohazards in a different thread. IMHO, most of us should spend very little time thinking about the second order effects of what we write and just write.
Something corroborating from Gernmany:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00138-3
Decade-long shift toward vegan meal options as part of dietary transition in German university canteens
Here we show menu and price trends using 3.7 million meal options from 340 German university canteens between 2015 and 2024. Plant-based options (vegetarian, vegan) rose from 63.7% to 70.5% (6.9 observed percentage points; 2.2 predicted percentage points per year). Vegan options increased by 23.1 points overall and 3.7 per year, while vegetarian options declined by 16.3 and 2.1, and meat-based options by 6.0 and 1.7, respectively. Vegan growth coincided more strongly with declining vegetarian than meat-based options, suggesting intra-plant-based replacement rather than direct substitution of animal-based options. Animal-based meals remained more expensive, while prices rose in parallel, suggesting economic factors alone cannot explain the shift.
I...guess this is good? But it really depends on the specifics. As Kenny Torella notes: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23273338/germany-less-meat-plant-based-vegan-vegetarian-flexitarian
Germans are eating about the same amount of beef as they were in 2011, but far less pork. But because pigs are large — pigs yield about 124 pounds of edible meat on average in Germany — the steep decline in pork only resulted in a reduction of about one-sixth of a pig per person. However, the 12.5 percent increase in poultry consumption, which looks modest on the chart below, has resulted in almost one extra chicken farmed for each of Germany’s 83 million residents because chickens are so small.
I talk about this paper in light of comparing more modern meat alternatives (Beyond/Impossible/etc.) to traditional vegetarian mains (tofu/curry/etc.), and why the academic literature at least suggests more cause for optimism about the latter than the former, here:
https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/p/the-more-successful-add-more-veggie
Research report: modern alternative proteins did not replace meat purchases in restaurants
To Jacob’s point, a 1 pp. increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a 3.3% higher suicide mortality rate. A 6 pp. decline in employment would be hugely disruptive. (Caveat that decline in labor force participation != unemployment)
Yes, rich people eat more meat. A lot more. From OWID
Is this relationship causal? Probably. Obviously this is hard to establish but I’d bet that if we did have well-identified studies they’d validate that.
Is the increase in meat consumption per capita as incomes rise offset by declining birth rates? Probably not. The differences in meat consumption between rich and poor countries is large (can easily be a factor of 10 or more).
Does a $5000 donation to ACE offset the potential harms? This is a deep question. I suppose you could build a model to address it. I think that model would be extremely brittle and probably rest on weak evidentiary foundations. So I have no idea.
My thought: I would take the job that most increases your human capital. I am increasingly of the opinion that the future is going to be weird and we really, really need to be building skills. The big picture is too murky to think about in a productive way and things are going to be chaotic. We should focus on navigating the incoming chaos.
Hi there
See also this[20] more recent meta-analysis that came to a similar conclusion about alternative proteins and other meat reduction interventions.
👋 I am lead author of that paper!
Two studies we looked at addressed alt proteins directly
Bianchi 2022 Replacing meat with alternative plant-based products (RE-MAP): a randomized controlled trial of a multicomponent behavioral intervention to reduce meat consumption 10.1093/ajcn/nqab414 Acharya 2004 Nutritional changes among premenopausal women undertaking a soya based dietary intervention study in Hawaii 10.1111/j.1365-277X.2004.00537.x The second paper is a small sample and doesn’t really address what we consider the modern generation of alt proteins. The first does. From that paper’s abstract:
Methods
Adult volunteers who regularly consumed meat were recruited from the general public and randomized 1:1 to an intervention or control condition. The intervention comprised free meat substitutes* for 4 weeks, information about the benefits of eating less meat, success stories, and recipes. The control group received no intervention or advice on dietary change. The primary outcome was daily meat consumption after 4 weeks, assessed by a 7-day food diary, and repeated after 8 weeks as a secondary outcome...
Results
Between June 2018 and October 2019, 115 participants were randomized. The baseline meat consumption values were 134 g/d in the control group and 130 g/d in the intervention group. Relative to the control condition, the intervention reduced meat consumption at 4 weeks by 63 g/d (95% CI: 44–82; P < 0.0001; n = 114) and at 8 weeks by 39 g/d (95% CI: 16–62; P = 0.0009; n = 113), adjusting for sex and baseline consumption. The intervention significantly increased the consumption of meat substitutes without changing the intakes of other principal food groups.
* Participants selected the meat-free substitute foods from a catalogue containing the full range of products available in a major UK grocery store at the time of the trial. This included mycoprotein meat alternatives and vegetable- and pulse-based meat substitutes.
How much should one update on this study? IDK. But by its own lights, giving people alt proteins for free—embedded in a larger intervention—had meaningful effects.
However, when we test intro-ing alt proteins in a hypothetical, online ordering, chipotle-like environment, alas we don’t find much.
Hi David,
It’s true that we aren’t powered to detect very small changes on any test. We did a fair bit of background work to target 5 pp. as our SESOI based on our understanding of what we could plausibly take to restaurants as an argument that they should add a chicken-based PMA to their menus.
if One were to have introduced a more more popular set of plant-based products it remains possible that these indeed would have substituted for the animal products.
Yes, that is possible. Our paper does not address what some other, more appealing thing would have done. However, taste parity is an open problem. My personal belief—out of scope of the data—is that we can think of consumers as extrapolating, when they see an item like “chickn’itas,” that it’ll basically be the category average, or on par with the other PMAs currently available at Chipotle, and making a choice based on that belief. Unfortunately, PMAs account for a small fraction of all sales (3% per this out-of-date article but I couldn’t find anything more up to date and official. However, based on 1-on-1 conversations, I think this number is still approximately right). Chipotle has tried many times to introduce more plant-based options. If a more popular and appealing option existed at the kind of margins that Chipotle looks for, we can assume they would have already made it available.
Regarding the chicken-vs-everything else split: the difference-in-difference CI ([−12.58, 0.73]) is wide, and we say in the paper that we can’t resolve which meat the displacement came from, alas.
Hi David, my colleagues and I have a forthcoming project that will address the substitution question using a large, novel dataset. (UPDATE: that preprint is now summarized in Research report: modern alternative proteins did not replace meat purchases in restaurants.)
Regarding the extent to which PBAs displace demand for meat products or provide more options for vegetarians, some work led by my colleague Jessica Hope is relevant (summarized here).
I suspect other teams have forthcoming work on this as well. Very interesting subject!
👋 we’ve updated this post to link to the now-published paper:
Hope, J. E., Green, S. A., Peacock, J. R., & Mathur, M. B. (2026). Effects of adding plant-based menu options on meat selection frequency: A randomized controlled experiment. Food Quality and Preference, 105931.
Than you for your kind words, @Vasile Stanescu ! I look forward to discussing more at Reducetarian 😃
I can’t recall anyone saying that the 2026 meta suggests that diet change is not viable. What remarks are you thinking of? Lewis, for instance, cites three papers I worked on as “finding little evidence of impact.” That’s a good high-level summary. James Ozden cites the same three papers in a Susbtack comment as evidence that “we haven’t figured out how to meaningfully reduce meat consumption.” Also a good high-level summary.
Who is saying that the task is not doable, that the game is not winnable (and citing these or any other papers in support of that point)?