Is it even possible to convince people to stop eating meat?
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect section, with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat.
Factory farming is a particularly wicked problem to solve.
Despite strong public concern for cruelty to farmed animals and large swathes of Americans telling pollsters that they're trying to cut back on meat, we keep eating more of it. And research has shown that it's nearly impossible to persuade most people otherwise. But a new study, which hasn't yet been published and is currently under review at an academic journal, might complicate that consensus.
Learning how the sausage gets made
In the experiment, University of Toronto professors Lisa Kramer and Peter Landry recruited 1,149 students and separated them into two groups. One group watched a 16-minute clip from the harrowing animal rights documentary Dominion about the treatment of pigs in meat production, while a control group watched a video about the role mushrooms play in forest ecosystems.
In surveys taken before the study, immediately after watching the video, and a week later, participants were asked to choose a protein — bacon, chicken, steak, tofu, or none — to add to a meal.
Before watching the video, 90.1 percent of students chose meat in their meal; a week after watching the video, 77.9 percent did — a 12.2 percent decline. Demand for pork, specifically, fell more sharply.
'Turns out, it's harder to order meat after watching Dominion,' Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at Stanford University's Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, wrote in a blog about the study. 'And it's especially harder to order pork after watching the segment on pigs.' (Green didn't work on the study but did provide the authors feedback on its design.)
Plenty of researchers have shown videos similar to Dominion to study participants and found little to no effect. So what made this one different? Kramer and Landry say it could simply be the high-quality nature of the film.
It was filmed in high definition and artfully edited, with close-up shots of distressed pigs, while most other factory farm footage is low-quality and shaky. It's a disturbing and unflinching look at industrial pig farming, though the narrator — actor Rooney Mara — speaks with a flat tone, as she carefully guides the viewer through practices that, on their face, should be illegal but are common and lawful. Some of those practices include:
Confining pigs in tiny crates for virtually their entire lives
Slamming runt piglets head-first into concrete as a form of cheap euthanasia
Removing piglets' tails, teeth, and testicles without pain relief
Using carbon dioxide gas chambers to knock pigs unconscious prior to slaughter, which can cause extreme suffering
What's more, the clip that participants watched makes no appeal for them to eat less meat or more plant-based foods, leaving viewers to come to their own conclusions. 'The task of connecting the experiences of pigs on industrial-scale farms (as depicted in the video) to one's own consumption choices is left entirely to the viewer,' Kramer and Landry wrote in the paper. (A lot of studies on the impacts of factory-farming documentaries use advocacy videos that directly ask the viewer to eat less meat.)
The study certainly has limits. For one, the average participant was 22 years old and participants skewed slightly female; young people and women are both groups that are more likely to be concerned about cruelty to farmed animals. And it only followed the participants for one week after the experiment.
Lastly, researchers didn't track what participants actually ate. Instead, the students indicated which protein they would add to a meal, with the understanding that they had a roughly 50 percent chance of winning a voucher for the meal they chose at a university cafeteria. At first, this struck me as a poor proxy for real-world behavior. But the researchers noted that another study that used a similar voucher approach and tracked what students actually ate found little discrepancy.
All this suggests that persuading individuals to eat less meat — a goal that many in the animal advocacy movement have largely given up on — might not be as hopeless as previously thought.
Why animal rights groups largely gave up on trying to change people's diets
The University of Toronto study results pleasantly surprised Green, who researches how to move society away from factory farming. For a time, he had been convinced that efforts to persuade people to eat less meat — especially with appeals to animal welfare — were ineffective.
His beliefs were informed by his research: Late last year, he and some colleagues published a meta-analysis, which is currently under peer review, looking at more than three dozen rigorous studies designed to persuade people to eat less meat. Overall, the studies found little to no effect. (It's worth noting, however, that a few studies involving much lengthier interventions, like reading an essay and joining a 50-minute group discussion or sitting through a lecture, have demonstrated sizable effects).
This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter
Sign up here for Future Perfect's biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more.
Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com!
Green's findings align with a change in the animal rights movement that took hold around a decade ago.
Since the 1970s, animal advocates have poured a lot of resources into persuading people to go vegetarian or vegan. Organizations ran expensive advertising campaigns, handed out millions of pamphlets at universities, lectured in classrooms, and penned letters to the editor and op-eds in newspapers, among many other tactics. But in spite of all the effort, American meat consumption kept rising.
By 2015, the largest animal advocacy organizations were shifting their focus toward political and corporate campaigns to ban some of the most egregious factory-farm practices, like tiny cages for pigs and egg-laying hens. Some groups also advocated for technological change — namely, making plant-based meat taste better, more affordable, and more widely available. The idea was that instead of trying to influence one person at a time, which had proven so difficult, they'd instead change the food system.
The pivot produced a lot of tangible progress for animals: Over a dozen states have restricted cages for farmed animals, and plant-based meat tastes better and is more widely available than ever. But I've wondered whether animal advocates have given up on public persuasion too soon, and in turn, made it harder to maintain their hard-won institutional and technological progress.
Animal advocates in Canada protest the cages that many egg-laying hens are confined in. Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals
Hens in battery cages, which are so small the animals can't spread their wings for their entire lives. Shatabdi Chakrabarti / FIAPO / We Animals
Progress won through corporate or political campaigns might struggle to withstand backlash 'if there isn't also culture change happening and people's attitudes shifting' about factory farming, Laura Driscoll, a social scientist who works at the Stray Dog Institute — a foundation that funds groups working to reform the food system — told me.
For example, plant-based meat sales jumped significantly between the late 2010s and early 2020s, but they've recently dipped back down. There might be a bigger market for these products, and more consumers might be immune to the fallacious argument that they're overly processed, if more people were persuaded of the ills of factory farming.
Some states are now rolling back animal welfare laws that advocates had previously persuaded them to adopt, while some members of Congress are pushing to eliminate all state-level cage bans. Many food companies that pledged to eliminate eggs from caged hens in their supply chain aren't following through. In the absence of a broader base of voters and consumers who see factory farming as an important social issue, corporations and politicians know they can backslide without much resistance.
The art of persuasion
Compared to straightforward metrics like how many pigs are still trapped in cages, culture change is 'harder to understand and harder to measure,' Driscoll said, so it's hard to know how much animal rights groups should invest in it. And if it works, it takes a lot of time and repeated exposure to get there. A study participant may not alter their meat consumption after watching one video or reading an essay, but they might change over time if they hear about it enough — and hear persuasive messages that appeal to them.
Currently, people are receiving very few messages about factory farming or meat reduction, as it's rarely covered in the news or discussed by politicians. Videos about the issue hardly ever go viral, and animal advocacy groups have pulled back from education and persuasion.
Meanwhile, as Green told me, consumers are inundated with messages telling them to eat more meat. Some of those messages are explicit, like fast food advertisements or influencers telling us we need more (animal) protein, to implicit ones, like recipe videos on social media or our friends and family members eating a standard American diet rich in meat. Meat companies also mislead consumers to believe farmed animals are treated much better than they actually are.
It's hard to imagine the public making meaningful reductions in meat consumption or advocating for significant changes to factory farming in this political, social, and information ecosystem. As researchers are prone to saying, more research is needed to know what could persuade more people on this issue: 'There's just not that much great research out there,' Green said. 'If you're a researcher in this field and you want to make a contribution, it's not that hard to be the first person to do something.'
The case for both dietary change and meat industry reforms can be made persuasively. Based on the Dominion study, it might only take 16 minutes of an unvarnished look into factory farms for it to break through to some people. In today's crowded attention environment, capturing those 16 minutes of people's time will be harder than ever, but Green said it's still worth the effort.
'I think that persuasion is a beautiful thing where we try to convince people using reason and argument, and take them seriously' as moral agents, he said. 'I do not want to give up on this.'
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Is it even possible to convince people to stop eating meat?
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect section, with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat. Factory farming is a particularly wicked problem to solve. Despite strong public concern for cruelty to farmed animals and large swathes of Americans telling pollsters that they're trying to cut back on meat, we keep eating more of it. And research has shown that it's nearly impossible to persuade most people otherwise. But a new study, which hasn't yet been published and is currently under review at an academic journal, might complicate that consensus. Learning how the sausage gets made In the experiment, University of Toronto professors Lisa Kramer and Peter Landry recruited 1,149 students and separated them into two groups. One group watched a 16-minute clip from the harrowing animal rights documentary Dominion about the treatment of pigs in meat production, while a control group watched a video about the role mushrooms play in forest ecosystems. In surveys taken before the study, immediately after watching the video, and a week later, participants were asked to choose a protein — bacon, chicken, steak, tofu, or none — to add to a meal. Before watching the video, 90.1 percent of students chose meat in their meal; a week after watching the video, 77.9 percent did — a 12.2 percent decline. Demand for pork, specifically, fell more sharply. 'Turns out, it's harder to order meat after watching Dominion,' Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at Stanford University's Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, wrote in a blog about the study. 'And it's especially harder to order pork after watching the segment on pigs.' (Green didn't work on the study but did provide the authors feedback on its design.) Plenty of researchers have shown videos similar to Dominion to study participants and found little to no effect. So what made this one different? Kramer and Landry say it could simply be the high-quality nature of the film. It was filmed in high definition and artfully edited, with close-up shots of distressed pigs, while most other factory farm footage is low-quality and shaky. It's a disturbing and unflinching look at industrial pig farming, though the narrator — actor Rooney Mara — speaks with a flat tone, as she carefully guides the viewer through practices that, on their face, should be illegal but are common and lawful. Some of those practices include: Confining pigs in tiny crates for virtually their entire lives Slamming runt piglets head-first into concrete as a form of cheap euthanasia Removing piglets' tails, teeth, and testicles without pain relief Using carbon dioxide gas chambers to knock pigs unconscious prior to slaughter, which can cause extreme suffering What's more, the clip that participants watched makes no appeal for them to eat less meat or more plant-based foods, leaving viewers to come to their own conclusions. 'The task of connecting the experiences of pigs on industrial-scale farms (as depicted in the video) to one's own consumption choices is left entirely to the viewer,' Kramer and Landry wrote in the paper. (A lot of studies on the impacts of factory-farming documentaries use advocacy videos that directly ask the viewer to eat less meat.) The study certainly has limits. For one, the average participant was 22 years old and participants skewed slightly female; young people and women are both groups that are more likely to be concerned about cruelty to farmed animals. And it only followed the participants for one week after the experiment. Lastly, researchers didn't track what participants actually ate. Instead, the students indicated which protein they would add to a meal, with the understanding that they had a roughly 50 percent chance of winning a voucher for the meal they chose at a university cafeteria. At first, this struck me as a poor proxy for real-world behavior. But the researchers noted that another study that used a similar voucher approach and tracked what students actually ate found little discrepancy. All this suggests that persuading individuals to eat less meat — a goal that many in the animal advocacy movement have largely given up on — might not be as hopeless as previously thought. Why animal rights groups largely gave up on trying to change people's diets The University of Toronto study results pleasantly surprised Green, who researches how to move society away from factory farming. For a time, he had been convinced that efforts to persuade people to eat less meat — especially with appeals to animal welfare — were ineffective. His beliefs were informed by his research: Late last year, he and some colleagues published a meta-analysis, which is currently under peer review, looking at more than three dozen rigorous studies designed to persuade people to eat less meat. Overall, the studies found little to no effect. (It's worth noting, however, that a few studies involving much lengthier interventions, like reading an essay and joining a 50-minute group discussion or sitting through a lecture, have demonstrated sizable effects). This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter Sign up here for Future Perfect's biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more. Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@ Green's findings align with a change in the animal rights movement that took hold around a decade ago. Since the 1970s, animal advocates have poured a lot of resources into persuading people to go vegetarian or vegan. Organizations ran expensive advertising campaigns, handed out millions of pamphlets at universities, lectured in classrooms, and penned letters to the editor and op-eds in newspapers, among many other tactics. But in spite of all the effort, American meat consumption kept rising. By 2015, the largest animal advocacy organizations were shifting their focus toward political and corporate campaigns to ban some of the most egregious factory-farm practices, like tiny cages for pigs and egg-laying hens. Some groups also advocated for technological change — namely, making plant-based meat taste better, more affordable, and more widely available. The idea was that instead of trying to influence one person at a time, which had proven so difficult, they'd instead change the food system. The pivot produced a lot of tangible progress for animals: Over a dozen states have restricted cages for farmed animals, and plant-based meat tastes better and is more widely available than ever. But I've wondered whether animal advocates have given up on public persuasion too soon, and in turn, made it harder to maintain their hard-won institutional and technological progress. Animal advocates in Canada protest the cages that many egg-laying hens are confined in. Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Hens in battery cages, which are so small the animals can't spread their wings for their entire lives. Shatabdi Chakrabarti / FIAPO / We Animals Progress won through corporate or political campaigns might struggle to withstand backlash 'if there isn't also culture change happening and people's attitudes shifting' about factory farming, Laura Driscoll, a social scientist who works at the Stray Dog Institute — a foundation that funds groups working to reform the food system — told me. For example, plant-based meat sales jumped significantly between the late 2010s and early 2020s, but they've recently dipped back down. There might be a bigger market for these products, and more consumers might be immune to the fallacious argument that they're overly processed, if more people were persuaded of the ills of factory farming. Some states are now rolling back animal welfare laws that advocates had previously persuaded them to adopt, while some members of Congress are pushing to eliminate all state-level cage bans. Many food companies that pledged to eliminate eggs from caged hens in their supply chain aren't following through. In the absence of a broader base of voters and consumers who see factory farming as an important social issue, corporations and politicians know they can backslide without much resistance. The art of persuasion Compared to straightforward metrics like how many pigs are still trapped in cages, culture change is 'harder to understand and harder to measure,' Driscoll said, so it's hard to know how much animal rights groups should invest in it. And if it works, it takes a lot of time and repeated exposure to get there. 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It's hard to imagine the public making meaningful reductions in meat consumption or advocating for significant changes to factory farming in this political, social, and information ecosystem. As researchers are prone to saying, more research is needed to know what could persuade more people on this issue: 'There's just not that much great research out there,' Green said. 'If you're a researcher in this field and you want to make a contribution, it's not that hard to be the first person to do something.' The case for both dietary change and meat industry reforms can be made persuasively. Based on the Dominion study, it might only take 16 minutes of an unvarnished look into factory farms for it to break through to some people. In today's crowded attention environment, capturing those 16 minutes of people's time will be harder than ever, but Green said it's still worth the effort. 'I think that persuasion is a beautiful thing where we try to convince people using reason and argument, and take them seriously' as moral agents, he said. 'I do not want to give up on this.'
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is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice. You'd think I would have been more self-conscious about walking around New York City while wearing no fewer than six health trackers at a time. For the first six months of this year, I wore smart rings on both hands, fitness bands on both wrists, biosensors plugged into my arms, and sometimes even headphones that monitored my brain activity. I was a little embarrassed, sure, but mostly I was anxious. This health tracking ensemble was part of an experiment — a failed one, I'll admit. By tracking as many health metrics as possible, I thought I'd find a way to feel younger, more energetic, and more fit. Products like the Oura ring, the Whoop band, the Apple Watch, and a growing variety of continuous glucose monitors promise to track things like your heart rate, body temperature, and metabolic health metrics, while their companion apps crunch that data into actionable advice about how to live your life. If one health tracker is good for you, theoretically, half a dozen should be great. What I learned from obsessively tracking my health for half a year is that paying too much attention to what your body is doing can ruin your life. Or at least it can ruin your understanding of healthy living, since too much information can steer your brain toward assuming the worst. Looking at the readouts from these fitness tracking apps sent me down dark holes of Googling symptoms and self-diagnosing conditions that my doctor assured me I did not have. But, I reasoned, he did not have all of the data that the health tracker collected, so he could be wrong, and AI, which is increasingly embedded in this tech, is very good at diagnosing things. I wouldn't caution against any and all health tracking. Now that the experiment is over, I'm only ever wearing one health tracker at a time. I've gained a new appreciation for how technology could become an essential part of healthy living in the near future, if you do it right. I'm not saying I have all the answers, but there are some things I would recommend to tracker-curious readers. And there are some things I would avoid at all costs. Today, Explained Understand the world with a daily explainer, plus the most compelling stories of the day. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Do wear a smart ring when you sleep Out of over a dozen gadgets tested, the one device that I added to my daily routine is an Oura ring that I only wear at night. (During the day, I wear an Apple Watch.) An Oura ring is a sensor-packed smart ring that measures a lot of the same things as a smartwatch, but is easier to wear while you sleep. The ring keeps track of your heart rate and movement to sense how well you sleep. Exactly how it does this is controversial with some sleep doctors, but it nonetheless generates a sleep score, which is oddly compelling. The first thing I do every morning, I'm almost embarrassed to say, is check my sleep score in the Oura app. If it's bad, I feel vindicated for feeling groggy. If it's good, I feel energized, even if I still feel groggy. The sleep score is a made-up metric, one that may or may not be correct based on how Oura's algorithms calculate various factors, but paying attention to the score was helpful for me. 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These biosensors stick a filament into your skin that measures the amount of glucose in your interstitial fluid, which can give you a good guess about what your blood glucose is at any given moment. If you don't know a lot about how metabolism works, the readouts can be horrifying. The first bowl of cereal I ate spiked my blood sugar outside of the normal range, which threw me into a panic — a panic that didn't entirely subside until I stopped wearing these sensors. Part of what fueled that anxiety was the fact that I didn't actually know how to make sense of the data that these monitors spit out. Most of them alert you when your glucose is spiking and then give you some kind of score, but it's not clear what a good score indicates other than that you've managed to eat fewer carbs, probably. The whole experience can feel like a high-tech diet. 'There's not a lot of time and effort spent on figuring out what is the actual question that I have that's really important to me and that I'm willing to go through some some effort and troubleshooting in order to come out the other side with a genuine discovery that I can use in my regular life,' said Gary Wolf, a tech journalist and founder of Quantified Self, a community of people who have been tracking their health metrics since the mid-2000s. Don't send your poop or blood to anyone in the mail Health tracking isn't confined to wearable devices. Some companies, like Viome, Function Health, and Ultrahuman, are getting into the labwork business. The idea is that you can pay for extra testing and get all the results back in an app that promises to help you understand the intricate details of your gut microbiome or metabolic health. Some assign you a biological age based on your test results, and all of them cost many hundreds of dollars. I did a battery of tests through Viome, including the gut microbiome test, which involved filling up little vials with poop and blood and dropping them at a post office. (Disclosure: Viome waived the fees for me.) The results seemed to tell me nothing that I didn't already reveal on the pre-test questionnaire, but I did have the opportunity to buy some very expensive supplements to address my problem areas. I don't recommend doing any of this. Don't pay for a subscription unless the gadget really improves your life If you've ever seen someone wearing a band around their wrist with a little hunk of plastic where the watch face should be, you've seen a Whoop band. This fitness-forward health tracker works a lot like a smartwatch without a screen, but the app is geared toward gym rats. The app not only gives you a strain score that measures how hard you've worked out, it also encourages you to recover. It costs $30 a month to enjoy all the features. It's not just Whoop that wants you to keep paying. Oura also charges a subscription fee to unlock all of its features, but it's just $6. Apple has the Fitness+ subscription for $10, but that includes a bunch of classes, not unique features on the Watch. All of these little fees add up over time, so if you really just want basic functionality, skip the subscription. Without it, you can still see your sleep, readiness, and activity scores on an Oura ring. (That's all I look at anyway.) The Whoop band doesn't work at all if you don't pay. Do take breaks The best advice I got from the many experts I talked to throughout my health tracking journey was to take off the devices from time to time. The absolute flood of information about my health often made me uneasy, and it even led to some disordered behaviors, especially when it came to tracking my glucose levels and seeing my readings start veering away from normal levels. Still, I wondered if I shouldn't intervene somehow. 'Sometimes atypical results found by wearables can make people anxious, and it may be difficult to offer them definite reassurance for these results,' said Dr. David Klonoff, president of the Diabetes Technology Society. 'If traditional medicine cannot provide definite answers, then these people sometimes turn to natural or alternative medicine.' Some health tracking companies want to take your money every month to keep using their services. Some want to sell you the latest generation of their device. Some want to sell you supplements. They all want you to keep using the trackers and apps, even if they're not necessarily making you healthier. That's good to keep in mind. So check in with yourself when you're wearing a health tracker. Take it off, and leave it off for a while. Without a torrent of alerts telling you to stand, sleep, or eat, you may actually feel better.
