How to encourage those around him, and more generally the populations, to eat less meat without making guilty? A thorny question, but nevertheless at the heart of the news, on which researchers from the University of Toronto have looked. The latter carried out a study, recently published on Social Science Research Network (website for the deposit of prepublications of scientific articles). The research focused on a group of 1149 students from the Rotman School of Management (Toronto). Volunteers were invited to view a video extract of about 15 minutes from the documentary “Dominion”, directed by the Australian NGO Farm Transparency Project In 2018. The film in question relates to animal exploitation in modern agriculture. No injunction or advice on meat consumption is given. On the other hand, the conditions of production of intensive breeding and the consequences for these animals are searched and documented. The goal in this research was to determine to what extent this method could encourage participants to eat less meat in the future.
Result of the races: appetite for vegetarian or vegan meals would have increased by 252.7% immediately after viewing the video. Conversely, the attraction for meat -based meals decreased by 27%. These preferences seem to be maintained in time. “”Compared to the basic levels, we note that demand after a week is still 121.8 % higher for meals based on plants and 13.5 % lower for meals based on meat“, note the researchers. The latter also note that the video could have a particularly significant impact on appetite for pork, with immediate drops of 45.2% and 30.1% a week later.
What about other meat products?
If the impact on other types of meat that pork seems less strong, having looked at the documentary, however, arouses immediate reductions, with an appetite for these meat products reduced by 24%. But seven days later, this reluctance to consume meat fell to 10.6%. The researchers also bring a little nuance to these results. “”Overall, the video seems effective enough to promote plant -based diet compared to other videos tested in the literature. Despite this, the relatively low popularity of pork compared to other meats in our sample suggests that the impact of video can be limited by its focus on pork, which raises the possibility that a wider representation of industrial meat production could be even more effective in promoting the consumption of sustainable food“Consider these.
Shock to trigger an awareness: the approach is not new, since several NGOs militant for ecology and/or animal welfare have used it for decades to raise awareness, like the famous French association L214. But in terms of the climate crisis, reducing its meat consumption has become a major issue all over the world. Livestock breeding represents around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions linked to human activities. Several studies have been carried out in recent years to determine which were the most effective methods to raise awareness.
One of them, produced by English researchers from the University of Durham and published at the end of 2023, consisted in disseminating messages relating to the climate and sanitary impact of meat, in order to see if it could encourage people to decrease their consumption of meat products. The meat dishes were associated with warning messages and illustrations, like those seen on cigarette packs. Some of these labels displayed content relating to the impact of meat on health, others on the climate or the risk of pandemic. The study has shown that the presence of warning messages (all kinds of confused) has contributed to reducing the proportion of meat -based meals by participants by 10%.