Defaulting to plant-based foods

The catastrophic effects of climate change are here: Blistering and deadly heat waves are scorching Europe, and the poles are melting, with sea-ice growth in Antarctica reaching unprecedented lows. Is there anything individuals can do about it?

The answer is a resounding yes. What we eat, in particular, matters a great deal. The claim that “cows are the new coal” may seem hyperbolic, but it is essentially accurate. Roughly a third of all demand-side greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions are from food systems, and beef alone accounts for a quarter of emissions produced by raising and growing food.

Moreover, the real price of animal-based meals does not reflect their carbon footprint and the resulting cost of mitigation efforts. Research shows that a shift toward plant-based diets, or to less environmentally harmful meats such as fish and chicken, would be better for people and the planet.

Recently, a global consortium of the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, Unicef and others concluded that to achieve sustainable and healthy dietary patterns, food systems will need to be transformed – and fast. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has also shown that decarbonising food systems can play a significant role in combating global warming.

Behavioural research has identified ways to influence decision-makers of all types – including farmers deliberating what to grow, retailers seeking to sell more climate-friendly foods, and consumers ordering in a restaurant. In the United States, the latter has significant potential, considering that Americans eat, on average, six meals outside of the home per week.

Presenting sustainable meals as easy and attractive, including changing the order and scale of plant-based options in buffets, has been shown to influence food choices. This approach is also relatively palatable, whereas bans and rules are typically viewed as overly paternalistic, and taxes on specific products like meat or sugar negatively affect the poor.

Given this, default policies in restaurants, cafes, and canteens could be a game changer. As powerful yet freedom-preserving “nudges,” they change the context of choice while still allowing individuals to decide. Defaults should not act as a standalone policy; rather, they should be part of a large-scale curation of those parts of the food system to which consumers are exposed, with industry and retail playing a large role. Wherever people decide, behaviourally informed policy tools could be applied.

Politicians may prefer supporting climate pledges, implementing food-waste laws, or calling for corporate sustainability practices, with some insisting that “people should make their own decisions around the food they eat.” But they can nudge food retailers to enlist their sophisticated marketing arsenal to make sustainable and healthy options (or in today’s lingo, a “planetary health diet”) more attractive, affordable, available, and socially acceptable. This would go a long way toward reducing GHG emissions worldwide.

Obviously, policymakers should never manipulate their constituents, no matter how important the goal. But powerful behavioural tools also work when made fully transparent. Built on insights derived from economics, consumer research, and decision science, such policies put people’s emotions, habits, biases and heuristics, social norms, and preferences center stage, and can be designed to mitigate climate change.

Most criticism of nudges – particularly that they are ineffective and crowd out more useful policy tools – does not hold water. Policymakers strive for “good governance of nudging,” and cities like New York and Copenhagen and regions worldwide are employing choice architecture to help transform food systems. By harnessing the power of suggestion, people’s inertia, and their quest for convenience, defaults are one of the most important tools to change people’s behaviour.

When the plant-based option is the default, and the non-vegetarian option becomes the “other” choice, meat consumption declines. A systematic review of 15 independent intervention studies published between 2012 and 2020, conducted in different settings in six European countries and the United States, concluded that vegetarian default interventions did substantially decrease consumers’ choice of meat dishes, with 53-87% fewer meat options selected.

A study conducted in Denmark showed over 84 per cent of 300 participants approved of changing the default lunch option to a vegetarian buffet. Further evidence strongly suggests that such defaults are a promising tool to test in different food choice settings. Supported by earlier studies, the University of Cambridge’s El-Erian Institute of Behavioural Economics and Policy (of which I am director) is currently running a similar field experiment in collaboration with 13 college cafeterias at the university.

Given these outcomes, it is possible to imagine “default vegetarianism” in restaurants, grocery stores, schools, and offices. As for how to introduce such defaults, the non-profit Better Food Foundation offers a wide range of resources and suggestions. “Meatless Mondays” gained traction worldwide and became a successful movement supported by many people and organizations. Terminology on menus could also play an important role: unlike “vegan,” words like “planetary” or “plant-based” allude to how food choices affect sustainability.

Transforming food systems as a form of climate action can begin with top-down policy change. At the UN Food Systems Summit, held two years ago in New York, activists, practitioners, policymakers, and researchers adopted this approach to meet the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. But while implementing these changes, policymakers must remember the importance of the human factor in food choices. Fortunately, many stakeholders are cooperating to test new policy tools and redesign food-choice funnels and norms.

There is no denying that consumers will need to switch to a more plant-based diet to reduce food systems’ GHG emissions. Together with other behaviourally informed policies that employ nudges, plant-based defaults promise to bring about a large drop in meat consumption while maintaining freedom of choice. They could lead us all to play a more active role in conserving the planet’s resources and mitigating climate change. — Project Syndicate

Lucia Reisch is Director of the El-Erian Institute of Behavioral Economics and Policy at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School.

• Opinion