Standardising plant-based menus at catering events shifts behaviour and reduces negative environmental impact.
What unsustainable behavior needs to change:
Imagine attending a conference and receiving an RSVP email requesting your meal preference. If you don’t respond, a default meal will be selected. For many, this default is convenient, especially when busy or indifferent.
What if the default were plant-based instead of meat-based? Would you notice or care? Consider this: In Fall 2020, 19.4 million college students attended at least one catered event. If each had a plant-based default meal, it could save 27 million kilograms of CO2 emissions, equivalent to 3 million gallons of gasoline. (US Environmental Protection Agency, 2021).
Our current food consumption patterns, particularly the heavy reliance on animal agriculture, significantly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – surpassing half of food-related emissions, despite providing less than half of average daily caloric intake. Transitioning towards a flexitarian or plant-based diet can mitigate these impacts; yet efforts to promote dietary changes have seen limited success. In this context, further research is necessary to develop effective strategies for shifting consumer behaviour towards more sustainable dietary choices.
The Green Nudge:
The concept of defaults is pivotal here. Default choices, the selections individuals automatically end up with if they don’t actively choose otherwise, have been effective in various domains due to their ability to nudge individuals towards desired behaviours without mandates. Little is known about the impact of making plant-based meals default choices at gatherings, particularly at catered events.
A research team from UCLA conducted a two-part study. The first part consisted of a randomised controlled trial, where participants attended three events at UCLA and Harvard; wherein their meal preference data was collected via randomised RSVP surveys. In the control group, the default meal included meat, and participants had to opt out for a plant-based meal. In the experimental group, the default meal was plant-based, and participants had to opt out for a meat-containing meal.
The result: Interventions to promote plant-based meal selection showed that making plant-based options the default significantly increased their uptake. Participants with plant-based defaults were over three times more likely to choose these meals than those with meat defaults. For example, if an event offers both beef and plant-based sandwiches, setting the plant-based option as default could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 42.3% (139 grams of CO2). Additionally, it would save 41.8% in land usage (445 square metres), 38.9% in nitrogen (912 grams), and 42.7% in phosphorus (361 grams).
Are you aware of any other nudges that help to promote planet-friendly diets? Feel free to get in touch: hello@green-nudges.com
From Serena Iacobucci, PhD in Behavioural Economics, who is a former post-doc researcher and honorary teaching fellow in Nudging against misinformation. The study presented here was led by Renate Boronosky, a PhD student at the Jennifer Jay Research Lab (UCLA). The JJR Lab is committed to fostering a sustainable and equitable future. With its diverse team of researchers, they aim to make a positive impact on the world.
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