How the Sausage Is Made: Testing the Effectiveness of an Informative Video in Promoting Sustainable Food Consumption - Livestream

In the work presented, we use an incentivized consumption measure to assess the behavioral impacts of watching a roughly 15-minute video about industrial-scale pork production (clipped from the Dominion documentary). They find, provisionally (based on data collected thus far), that the demand for meat-containing meals decreases by 26.4% immediately after watching the video and by 12.2% at a one-week follow-up. The video appears to have a particularly large impact on the demand for pork, with immediate and one-week decreases of 48.5 and 26.2 percent, respectively. We observe (smaller yet still significant) decreases in the demand for other meat products, with immediate and one-week reductions of 22.8 and 9.8 percent, suggesting that information about industrial-scale pork production can affect preferences for other types of meat as well.

Overall, our video appears to be quite effective in promoting plant-based eating when comparing the observed effects on demand to the effects of other videos tested in the literature. As we discuss, there are some unique characteristics of our video (relative to those used in previous studies) and of our primary consumption measure that may contribute to this discrepancy. Even so, the relatively low baseline popularity of pork (compared to other meats) in our sample suggests that the video’s impact may have been constrained by its focus on pork, raising the possibility that a broader portrayal of industrial meat production could be even more effective in promoting plant-based eating.

Speaker: Peter Landry, University of Toronto, Mississauga

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