What we eat has a huge impact not just on our health, but also on that of the planet. This is common knowledge. Yet despite a smorgasbord of studies telling us which foods we should and shouldn’t consume, many of us find it hard to do the right thing. Sophie Attwood’s research takes a different approach: rather than presenting the bare facts on diet and its contribution to climate change, she uses behavioural science to persuade people to choose greener options. In May, she and her colleagues at global sustainability think tank the World Resources Institute released a on how the food industry can nudge people towards more sustainable fare. The aim isn’t to browbeat consumers, but to increase the appeal of plant-based options and reduce our desire to choose meat.
Graham Lawton: How much of a problem are unsustainable diets for the climate?
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Sophie Attwood: Massive. The type of food people eat is the biggest cause of climate change related to diet. A lot of people think it’s stuff like food miles and pesticides. It’s actually not. It’s beef, for multiple reasons, the main one being that cattle often get fed on soya. Soya is usually from deforested areas, so you have to cut down the rainforest. And then you need . It’s a highly inefficient way to produce calories. Aside from that, the cattle themselves emit a lot of methane from gut fermentation and nitrogen from manure. There are greenhouse gases along the entire chain.
We simply cannot continue to eat the way we do, be able to feed everybody and keep the natural environment. We’re at the point where we need to do everything very quickly.
So what is a sustainable diet?
It’s not necessarily a meat-free diet. It’s just a radically reduced amount of meat – especially beef. The average level of beef an individual eats in high-consuming regions, such as Europe and America, is somewhere around [the equivalent of] three burgers a week. We need to get that down to about one and a half.
How can your research help?
We work with lots of companies in the food service sector – restaurants, takeaways, canteens and catering companies. They are a really strong entry point into influencing people. We find all the different behavioural science techniques that can be done, everything from marketing and product placement to nudging. We work with the companies to implement these and see if we get a change in consumer choices. And then we conduct a lot of experiments so we’ve got evidence that it works.
What are the most effective tools to encourage consumers to shift their diets?
In 2018, we published a looking at everything that had been done in behavioural science to try to shift diets. We found 57 behaviour change techniques. Using indulgent, taste-focused language came out as the big one. So don’t talk about plant-based food being vegetarian or vegan because it really puts people off. Ignore the fact that it doesn’t contain meat, just talk up the positive attributes. I haven’t seen a study where it doesn’t work.
Have things moved on since 2018?
We’ve just redone the exercise, and this time around we found 90 techniques. Language still comes out quite strongly. Another is menu engineering. The way you structure a menu and the content and the design have a massive influence on what people choose. The classic one is that things at the top left of the menu get chosen more. People’s food choices are quite easily influenced.
What other techniques are there?
Take any images of meat off the menu because they prompt people to choose meat. And put the plant-rich dishes into the main body of the menu, as meat-eaters will tend to ignore a veggie section.
One that works all the time is taking meat off the menu. Restaurants present a plant-based-only menu and you have to ask the server for meat, a bit like what we did for cigarettes when we put them behind the counter. That one works a tonne, but for businesses trying to sell food and stay in business, it’s seen as not that feasible.
Or you do things like a pre-order form for events, so when you go to an event, you have a default plant-based menu unless you opt in to meat.
Menu language and menu engineering have worked really well. It’s about a 10 per cent shift in choices, which is pretty substantial.
Does health messaging also work?
This is quite interesting. Something like 80 studies in our review look at health messaging. Researchers have spent years looking at it. Just don’t bother. It doesn’t work.
What’s the most surprising nudge?
Natural sounds like birdsong calm people down, and people make more considered choices when they are in a calmer rather than an emotionally aroused state.
What about making plant-based meals cheaper?
Yeah, people are sensitive to price. We know incentives work, but industry needs to find a way to implement them that doesn’t dent their business. There’s also a point at which you need to ensure that you’re not signalling it’s a worse-quality product.
If you want people to change, you have to offer good-quality, really tasty plant-based options. Restaurants need to get on board with doing a lot more product redevelopment and offer chefs training in plant-based foods because, at the moment, they don’t get trained in that.
How receptive are food service companies to this kind of approach?
It usually lands very positively. Chefs are creatives. It’s basically saying to chefs, please be creative. And they really would like to be the conduit for healthier and more sustainable choices.
How do you respond to a business that says, what’s in it for us?
A lot of the Gen Z cohort [born from around the mid-1990s to early 2010s] – and probably a lot of everybody else – are now becoming much more aware of the link between diet and climate, so demand for more and better-quality plant-based foods is really growing. It does make good sense for businesses to be ahead of that curve. They also have the benefit of being able to sell environmental credentials.
One thing you’re fighting against here is the meat industry, which has been . How do you push back against corporate might?
I’m not sure we can. You can’t push back against massive budgets. To be honest, the industry is not pro-environmental and it never will be. They can make positive changes, like trying to get cows to emit less methane, which is welcome. But the big thing people need to do is cut some meat out of their diet.
Can individual choices really shift the dial?
That’s a good point. But think about the accumulated impact: 8 billion people are eating three meals a day. So if you can get even a slight change, it scales up. It’s actually one of the most substantially important things you can do, and it’s not a big thing, it’s not costly, it’s not a huge time investment. It’s basically impossible to get where we need to go without it.
